Word: freude
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...splendor of inspiration and sheer surprise. The development of zero as a tangible number is a breathtaking conception; the idea, like some arithmetical antimatter, was among the forces that eventually propelled man into space. Darwin's thought enforced an intellectual evolution of its own. So did Freud's and Einstein...
...plunging through pianos, airborne castles, flaming keys and animated bottles are all part of the artist's whimsical, gravity-free universe. Magritte: Ideas and Images by Harry Torczyner (Abrams; 277 pages; $45) provides an opulent but ambiguous visual festival. The artist, half magician, half charlatan, paints with paperback Freud insights and melodramatic compositions so calculating that he sometimes makes Norman Rockwell appear primitive. Yet in the midst of a darkened landscape, Magritte can mysteriously illuminate the sky: on an ominous day he makes it rain identical men in bowler hats, as impassive and relentless as Kafka's bureaucrats...
...some unsisterly rancor and, overall, deadly serious intentions-the largest political conference of women ever assembled in the country. The nearly 2,000 delegates and more than 12,000 observers who later jammed Sam Houston Coliseum for the three-day National Women's Conference provided some answers to Freud's vexing question: What does a woman want...
...some local inflammation. Some doctors also implicate bodily chemicals, notably histamine and serotonin. Investigators at Baylor University have even reported that over a prolonged period of time migraines may damage some brain cells?apparently without any noticeable mental impairment. Migraine sufferers have included such intellectual stalwarts as Jefferson, Freud, Nietzsche and Darwin. Lewis Carroll is thought to have conceived the more bizarre scenes in his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland during the hallucinatory "auras"?flashing of lights before the eyes ?that often precede the headaches...
Bate's Johnson is not without its faults. His overreliance on Freud can become tiresome, and he tends to belabor his evidence. But his commentaries on Johnson's mind are unfailingly ingenious. The severe breakdown Johnson suffered in his 50s, Bate argues, was provoked by "the habit of leaping ahead in imagination into the future and forestalling disappointment"; he had renounced hope, the one virtue he believed essential to life. This sort of intuitive speculation, intimate but never condescending, recalls Johnson's own method in Lives of the Poets. No other biographer of Johnson has meditated...