Word: insightfulness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most original insight in Cavell's essay is his identification of the central philosophical question in Walden the problem of free will and determinism. Men determine themselves through the mythologies they create whether the mystery of predestination or demigod at technology mystery of predestination or the damaged of technology. Thoreau says, He proceeds from there to create a mythic life this own at Walden Ponds which has written call to his neighbors, and to us, to awaken and shed the necessities we have brought upon ourselves Thoreau clearly realizes that the casting off and rebuilding of one's own life...
...effort is remarkable, not for any startlingly original insight concerning any one of these cultural stars or super-stars, but for the ingenious way that Trilling readjusts our view of each in the perspective of an evolving search for self, through the conceptual models of sincerity and authenticity. Both of these words, unfortunately, have drifted into verbal impotence of late. As Trilling admists, "sincerity" these days is at best found at the end of letters which are quite the opposite of sincere. And authenticity has been relegated to antique shops and little-read long-winded existentialist treatises. Trilling sets about...
...Museums and Women he succeeds in restoring completeness to our view of the physical world, threatened and impaired by the generalizing blur of communications media, through precise description; and, if his characters muse or mediate, he follows them with the fluidity of a writer who was welded his intellect, insight and emotion into vision. In his less serious pieces he is sometimes simply very funny, filling in the words to a dinosaur tea-party or chronicling the invention of the horse-collar. But his artistic effectiveness derives mostly from his subtleties of form. As if the drama in his allegory...
WITH ONE PHASE of the Vietnam War concluding, we should prepare for the deluge of books and films that will help explain it. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War offer more insight and experience than many other Indochina experts. Their testimony in Winter Soldier documents the unique brutality encouraged in young GI's by Vietnam combat and their training at home. In this war atrocities are premeditated and recurring, not isolated aberrations. Marines receive a short lesson in cruelty during their pre-embarkation pep talk, when the company officer strangles a small rabbit, skins it, and throws its carcass...
...Vidal is also capable of delivering compact and provocative insight. On cliché analogies between the Roman Empire and the United States, for example: "I should not look to Rome for comparison but rather to the Most Serene Venetian Republic, a pedestrian state devoted to wealth, comfort, trade and keeping the peace, especially after inheriting the wreck of the Byzantine Empire, as we have inherited the wreck of the British Empire...