Word: graspings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...himself. Secure in middle class New York humor, he's reaching for what lies behind it, for what it can evolve into when nurtured by sensitivity and misfortune. He has tried to blend intelligent humor with an Albee-like vision of psychological deterioration and disorientation. Unfortunately, this exceeds his grasp...
More evident than a common grasp of Marxism was the common practice of homosexuality, at least as far as Burgess, Maclean and Blunt were concerned. Here again Philby was different, being an ardent womanizer, though, it would seem, odd in his ways. His third wife, an American lady acquired in Beirut, in her excellent little book The Spy I Loved, describes how he wooed her, which involved sending her a whole series of loving messages written on tiny pieces of tissue paper, with instructions to burn them when read and carefully scatter the ash, or, if that should be inconvenient...
Kevin O'Morrison displays an intuitive grasp of all this, and his Ladyhouse Blues is suffused with a contagious humanity. Mood, rather than action, dominates the evening, and the play is anchored with palpable authority...
...clear at just what magnitude (or diminutude) a number passes beyond the capacity of an ordinary person to grasp -that is, to picture the quantity. Yet obviously a great effort is required even to cope with what is symbolized by a billion. The proof lies in those familiar tormented illustrations that writers cook up in the hope of suggesting the amount of a billion: the 125-mile-high stack of dollar bills that would add up to about a billion, the airplane propeller turning around the clock at 2,400 r.p.m. that would fall short of spinning a billion times...
...hard, as Barth noted, to grasp the scale and meaning of the murder of millions of human beings. After statements like Castro's it is harder still. Extraordinary acts of murder slip by us, easing past our dulled sensibilities. Millions have died in Cambodia, as, it seems, will millions more. Persistent reports confirm that the Brazilian government is massacring the Amazon Indians to permit exploitation of the Brazilian hinterland. How can we describe these atrocities, how can we summon up the will to intervene, as the U.N. says we have the right to do, if "genocide" is just another lame...