Word: lovely
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...madmen have such seething brains," that lovers, in short, are too full of folly, too much aflame, too rich in their imaginations. Nowadays, often, our problem seems just the opposite. Prudence makes us measure out our hearts with coffee spoons, and discretion is the better part of Valium. Love has always been a messy affair, and that is precisely why it cannot be easily legislated. Make romance a thing for lawyers, and callousness and shame turn into crime and punishment. Yet today we have girls suing their dates for standing them up, and star-crossed ex-lovers -- the former partners...
Technology, too, serves to make our liaisons more dangerous. Rob Lowe was apparently uncovered by a videotape, common-law suitors are often betrayed by photographs, and, in response to all this, more and more people choose to interface, date or even make love over the phone. If a modern Juliet were to try to reach her lover before feigning her own death, she might well hear, "Hi! This is Romeo! Nobody's here right...
...this is not to suggest that caution is a bad thing: Romeo and Juliet died prematurely, after all. Romance has always included some degree of calculation. Indeed, the very notion of true love, according to many scholars, is a relatively recent invention; in most places, in most times, marriage has been a practical arrangement. Those who scoff at matrimonial ads in Indian papers may have few qualms about placing SWM notices in their local tabloids; a blind date is only an arranged marriage in potentia. If disease and collision liability have put a crimp in promiscuity, that...
...concludes with a vision of unity, of natural harmony. So, after all the lunacies and bumps of Shakespeare's starlit night are over, the spirits come down to put everything to right, and the lovers awaken with the morning lark only to suspect that it was all a dream. Love is blind, and its victims are mad, the poet suggests, but only for a night, a brief, forgetful spell. Perhaps even in 1600 that might have seemed an escapist thought; in 1989, however, a midsummer night's dream may be our best hope of a happy ending...
...amend her earlier list of favorite reading: add Doctorow's Billy Bathgate and Mann's Tonio Kroger to a shelf that already features Flaubert, Henry James and John Fowles.) In earnest, carefully molded sentences, she strives to dispel the notion that she is strictly a TV creation. "I really love what you learn every day in the business," she says. "I love the breathtaking way we walk into people's lives and ask them anything we want and then leave. For a moment you have available to you the whole universe of a person's life -- the pain...