Word: lifelessly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sabom found that 40% of his random sample had vivid memories of their brush with death. A third had what he calls purely "autoscopic" experiences, in which they remember floating at ceiling height above the operating table (or battlefield) and looking down on their own lifeless bodies. About half had "transcendental" experiences, in which they recall traveling through a dark tunnel toward a bright light. Some, like Owen Thomas, encountered other figures or entered unearthly landscapes like those painted by Hieronymus Bosch. Several patients reported both autoscopic and transcendental elements...
Lindberg is a good con man. Contemporary literary critics can be lifeless and dutifully impenetrable. As Saul Bellow's Von Humboldt Fleisher put it in Humboldt's Gift, "Their business is to reduce masterpieces to discourse." Lindberg takes care of more business than most readers may care to handle. But his new readings of old books demonstrate how ingeniously some of our best writers juggled the subject of high ideals and low practices. It is an act that requires more than grace under pressure. In Lindberg's felicitous and confident phrase, it takes "poise in ambivalence...
...naked eye, inanimate objects like a block of stone or a piece of metal appear totally lifeless. But scientists see a veritable cauldron of activity in the most passive-looking object. Its atoms and molecules are in constant motion, vibrating furiously, bumping into neighbors, reeling in every direction. Though imperceptible to human senses, this chaotic ballet is critically important. Not only does it determine the very nature of observed matter (what makes a stone a stone, for example), it controls what will happen when one substance is brought together with another...
...really see the beauty and truth of the butterfly, one had to kill it and mount it--and therefore lose much of its truth and beauty. Similarly, the writer's problem is that we must take ideas and images out of the flow of events, and mount them on lifeless ink and paper. Our daily challenge as newspaper reporters is not--as the article suggested--to "take events out of the flow of reality and to protray them two-dimensionally," but rather to keep the events ALIVE as we pin them down in words...
...speak that way. Which is fine. The problems arise when Dunne and Didion substitute a peculiar, grunting short-hand that limits the characters and leaves the curious unenlightened. The poor dialogue, combined with the writers' need to explain a complicated and ever-changing plot, result in a dusultory and lifeless narrative...