Word: heros
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...fallen down a well. He is horrified at the prospect of shinnying down 60 ft. into the unknown. Nevertheless, he succeeds. When he proudly brings his wages home, his wife looks at his disheveled state and decides he has robbed someone for the money. A similar outcome awaits the hero of A Horse and Two Goats. An old man, who daily pastures the two scraggly remnants of a once expansive flock, is accosted by a tourist from the U.S. The American wants to buy the stone horse on whose pedestal the Indian sits. The Indian wants to sell his goats...
Wagener prefers to probe weaknesses that excuse his own fall from power. He sees Hitler as a poor administrator and a bad judge of human nature. It follows that his Volk hero is surrounded by "simpletons, mindless scum, and flatterers," most notably Himmler, Goebbels, and Göring, who greets Wagener in a red dressing gown and scarlet slippers with turned-up toes. To anyone familiar with office politics, this is a calculated rudeness. Wagener does not seem to get the message. Ever the intellectual snob, he sees Göring as a mental patient rather than a shrewd realist who knows...
...British, who are rarely mentioned in this book, have come and gone. World War II is recalled for its temporary effects on the price of rice. The riots that break out between Hindus and Muslims when India achieves independence are seen through the eyes of a neutral, nondescript hero: "It was on the whole a peaceful, happy life--till the October of 1947, when he found that the people around had begun to speak and act like savages." The assassination of John F. Kennedy reaches this region as a rumor, and a fairly incredible one at that. The slain President...
...shave their two-year-old son's head and offer his hair as tribute if he recovers from whooping cough and convulsions. Unfortunately, the healthy young man is now 20 and in no mood to cooperate: "You had no business to pawn my scalp without consulting me." The hero of All Avoidable Talk is a clerk who learns from his astrologer that a period of bad luck will end if he can avoid saying anything that might give offense to anybody for one more day. Naturally the employee has nothing but grief at the office and finds himself...
...heavy argument indeed. But Robinson does not pursue it doggedly or even systematically (to have done so with such elusive material as music would have been painfully Procrustean). What he offers instead is an interesting potpourri of perceptions, suggestions and possibilities. He demonstrates, for example, the despair of the hero of Winterreise by noting that Schubert consistently describes reality in a minor key and changes into the major only when he is shifting into fantasy. This is a somewhat technical point, necessarily, for most writing about music is either technical or gush. In addition, Robinson has the wit to confess...