Word: graspings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that Speer is not a believer, in either God or much of anything. In metaphysics as in religion, he is fundamentally an agnostic. Though he decries the lack of morality in Nazi Germany, Speer can offer no alternative. He writes in 1952, "Much too late I am beginning to grasp that there is only one valid kind of loyalty: toward morality," but the remark has an empty ring because Speer has no moral system, still less an allegiance to one. If he ever tried to confront the problems of moral philosophy or religious faith, it is not apparent in these...
...fascination with it, Hailey himself is an outsider to the world he writes about--he was born in England and is a Canadian citizen--and understandably he does not have a perfect grasp of the social relations of the American ruling class. Making Roscoe Heyward a Boston Brahmin, an aristocrat, with an only son who is a certified public accountant, may seem to Harvard sensibilities to be ever so slightly off, but it is the kind of minor point that doesn't mean a great deal. Though life in general and Hailey's obsession, class, in particular, are infinitely subtle...
...evening is a disappointment. Bilby's Doll confirms the composer's ambitious reach, but not, alas, his grasp of the subject. The story is drawn by Floyd himself from A Mirror for Witches, a historical novel by Esther Forbes. The libretto is as cluttered with conflicts as an O'Neill play, but it does not have half the dramatic impact. This comes as something of a surprise. Floyd's creed is that opera can succeed today only if the composer pays as careful attention to plot as if he were writing a play: the audience must...
...aides concedes they first ran an "essentially negative campaign" against Reagan, assailing his proposal to lop $90 billion off the federal budget. But in his first campaign foray into New Hampshire two weeks ago, Ford turned more positive and presidential. On his budget, for example, he demonstrated his impressive grasp of its complexities, although his speeches were unexciting...
...Reality Grasped. Millet's sympathies were republican. His whole conception of peasant realism was in tune with, and fortified by, the political experiences of 1848: to grasp plebeian reality was to engage in a revolutionary act. But he was no militant. As Herbert is careful to show, Millet's imagination was fatalistic and conservative: the peasants, in his view, could never escape their cycle of toil but were bound like weary oxen to the mill of earth and seasons. That was the root experience of his own peasant childhood...