Word: indistinctness
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...indistinct battle lines reflected the ethnic and cultural divisions that have beset Pakistan since its creation as a Moslem homeland when British India was partitioned in 1947. Two predominantly Moslem areas that used to be part of India became a new country, the two parts separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory. Thus, though 80,000 West Pakistani soldiers were on hand to keep order in East Pakistan last week, their supply bases were 1,000 miles away and most food and ammunition had to be carried 3,000 miles around the coast of India. The troops -mostly tall...
...Voices, indistinct, across dark water. One is heavy, asking; the other soft, answering. It is almost possible to make out words. Two boys, wild with the dark, swim near to listen, from the island where they have been camping. As they approach the neighboring island of the voices, a splash betrays them. The heavy voice rages. A shot slaps the water. The boys dive, frog-swim, drift, reach shore, and lie safe and ignorant in the chill. What were the voices saying...
...oral exam for his degree, Harry Bailey is called upon to defend his thesis. The conversation shifts to a discussion of The Great Gatsby, and soon a professor trots out his own thesis- that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a homosexual. The voices grow louder and the arguments more indistinct, simultaneously reducing hero -and institution-to victims...
...like this now, imagine what it was before. Our fathers dressed in their World War II uniforms. listening to Roosevelt on the radio: things like this happened before most of us were born, so they belong to the indistinct memory of books, to the chronicle of another age. It's sad to think of what we missed. And it is possible to be nostalgic for a world we never knew. This must be why the still fixity of photographs recalls so much, why an album of snapshots from James Joyce's Paris days is as suggestive as Ulysses...
People look at Vietnam... the figures shadowy, mostly out of sight; the voices indistinct, isolated threats without meaning; isolated glimpses, part of an elbow, a man's jacket (who is the man?), part of a face, a woman's face. Ah, she is crying. One sees the tears. Two tears. One counts the tears. Two bombing raids... I wonder what it is that the people who run TV think about the war, because they have given us this keyhole view; we have given them the airwaves, and now, at this crucial time, they have given us back this keyhole view...