Word: hindsight
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...HAMILTON'S BIOGRAPHY is no sensationalized account of the tumultuous life of a man whose fame is taken for granted. The biographer makes no speculations as to why women found Lowell so fascinating. His mission is instead to prove Lowell's place in American poetry. Hamilton's hindsight-fueled comments on Lowell's volumes fit neatly into the episodes of the poet's life. It is this juxtaposition of events and critical analysis which brilliantly destroys the view of ideal art as isolated from history--by making the history helpful, if not indispensable, to understanding and appreciating...
...Hindsight suggests that Harry Truman at first had trouble understanding when he was talking privately and when he was not. At dinner with 200 members of the Reserve Officers Association in 1949, Truman got worked up over criticism of his crony, Major General Harry Vaughan, and called Columnist Drew Pearson an "s.o.b." The White House purged the transcript, but it was too late. Gasped the Chicago Sun-Times: "The dirty phrase used by Mr. Truman has shocked millions who feel that every President becomes a symbol for clean-minded youth...
...With hindsight, Updike's unswerving dedication to realistic fiction looks both daring and inspired. At the beginning of his career, the prevailing wisdom held that Joyce, Proust and Kafka had made the old-fashioned novel redundant, a tired illusion that had been exposed once and for all as a sham. Literature should no longer pretend to portray people doing things: it ought to be an artful arrangement of words on a page. Critic Richard Oilman, typically, called narrative "that element of fiction which coerces and degrades it into being a mere alternative to life." Updike's novels...
...since the Cuban missile crisis, many commentators have examined the affair and offered a wide variety of conclusions. It seems fitting now that some of us who worked particularly closely with President Kennedy during that crisis should offer a few comments, with the advantages both of participation and of hindsight...
...stomach." His adventures are many, but nightfall brings them to an end: "As I looked at earth and air and sky the melancholy unquestioning thought came to me that I was a poor prisoner between heaven and earth, that all men were miserably imprisoned in this way . . ." Hindsight lends this perception, recorded in 1917, some added poignancy. Walser died on Christmas Day in 1956 while taking a walk on the grounds of his sanatorium in eastern Switzerland...