Word: grasp
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...failure was not so much in policy as in performance. Except for a few notable exceptions, U.S. leadership in world affairs had been unimaginative and uncertain. Time & again the U.S. had failed to grasp its opportunities. When Britain's Ernest Bevin suggested a union of Britain and Western Europe, the U.S. had cheered loudly, then sidestepped. The union idea died on the vine. In the U.N., around the anterooms and lounges, the most frequently heard complaint from delegates who looked to the U.S. for leadership was: "We would like to follow you but we don't know where...
...dazed. The loudspeaker system installed by the Germans blared martial airs and Communist communiqués from every streetcorner. A snatch of music or a few glibly triumphant phrases would suddenly hit people as reminders of the thing that had just happened, so quickly that they still could not grasp it. Men wept convulsively and uncontrollably...
Somehow, though, all this is never more than partly successful. Once in a while, glimmerings of the Myth shine out, but more often the reader is too tangled up in meandering and philosophizing to grasp the insights that always seem to lie just below the surface of comprehension. Lockridge's peculiar arrangement of incidents is of little help. For some reason, he has invented an annoying little stunt of running together the last sentence of an episode in 1892 with the first few words in a flashback sequence. Perhaps this ties the two together in the reader's mind...
...once. If he started on the tip of the nose, the rest of the face would lose shape and perspective. "The distance between one side of the nose and the other," he wrote, "is like the Sahara." Later, in an effort to grasp the whole, his sculptures began to shrink until they became so small that they would fall apart at the touch of his knife. Finally, his figures began to seem real to him only when they were long and slender. "And it is almost there," says Giacometti, "where I am today...
Monsarrat commands two literary skills: he uses the English language with quiet, respectful competence, and he describes most vividly the processes of skilled work-how a ship is run, how a blitzed house is scoured for survivors. But the emotional patterns of human relationships are as yet beyond his grasp. Monsarrat's may seem a rather small talent, but this book gives evidence that he may yet do some fine things...