Word: metaphor
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...ramblers and jugglers John Leubdorf (to borrow from his name the "S" he neglects to place in "Nietzche") is the most adroit magician and so the most irritating, for one feels that if he stopped sliding loosely from metaphor to metaphor he might make something of the more melodic lines of "End of Eroica." On the other hand, looking at "Nietzche," I'm not so sure. What is one to make...
...long as he has no alternative to Soviet support, Fidel Castro's course is determined. We will never know, to use George Kennan's metaphor, whether Castro will go through an open door until we stop trying to push him through a closed...
...severest test of the novel reader is not the interior-decorating lady author whose every point is petit; nor is it the literary bedroom peeper of the huff-puff-periphrasis school ("Metaphor pounded at his temples and his heart swelled with simile"). The most egregious trier of patience is, surely, the Author Who Has Read Proust. He will send his hero into the kitchen to mix a drink, say, but sure as Remembrance of Things Past comes in seven volumes, the ice tray wall remind the hero of another, earlier ice tray, half-shrouded in the mists of memory...
This is rural tragedy; by squeezing humanity in a Granadan village into an even more primitive lump than it actually is, Lorca wanted to fill his stage with constricting unreality: characters talk to each other in indirect but elemental metaphors, and one character, Death as a beggar-woman, actually exists as such a metaphor. Even the Moon comes on to make a speech. The simple trouble is that like nearly all rural tragedy Blood Wedding is the sort of melodrama into which actors are reluctant to empty their energies, and that therefore strikes audiences as faintly embarrassing vulgarity...
...Dinesen, Thomas Mann and Thornton Wilder-seem to have little in common. But all illustrate Wescott's passionate belief in the magical power of a story to hold those brooding truths about human behavior that cannot be abstracted as philosophy or illuminated in the swift lightning of poetic metaphor...