Word: inventive
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...into his confidence. The marshal, a kind of Hermann Göring character, exudes animal vitality, lives lustily and apologizes for nothing. He is engagingly frank with Steinbaum: "I don't see anything but beasts, scrapping and clawing each other from the beginning of time. I neither invent another world that isn't there, nor do I go whining to my mother because the world is harder and nastier than I expected. I do my best to be harder and nastier than anybody else." While other Nazis have appeared "mad, bureaucratic or spineless" to Steinbaum, the marshal seems...
...counteract the existing emotional preconceptions and the partisan vocabulary that clouds East-West writing and thinking, Johnson has tried to invent an entirely neutral language. It avoids metaphor. It examines not souls but outer surfaces, which can be seen and verified. What emerges with surprising vividness is a finely woven texture of physical existence in the East zone. Against this background, a Western reader, spurred by the effort to fill in the outlines of individual emotion only hinted at by the author, soon begins to speculate on small and large moral questions. Sample problem for a border guard...
...smiles that shrewd little smile the French always smile when they talk about sex, the one that means: I'm so glad you asked me that, because now I can show you how horribly knowing and worldly wise I am. "Get a lover," Mother says, "or better still, invent one-like I did. I sent myself flowers and got my girl friends to call me. If a man answers...
...seen anything in the least like them before. A single look at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them...
Jettisoned Cargo. The white man did not invent slavery. For centuries the tribes along the Guinea coast (the 4,000 miles of West African coastline stretching from present-day Mali to Angola) had made slaves of one another. But the insatiable European slavers, trading in guns, powder and rum, set off an ever-widening wave of violence. Rival tribes raided incessantly and reached out into the interior for fresh supplies of victims...