Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...artificial eye turned inward is not a bad metaphor for the world according to Wallace. So is tennis, as represented here by the Incandenzas' son Hal, a teen court prodigy with a gift for lexicography and a taste for recreational drugs. The game as Wallace portrays it is a good illustration of the paradox that there is no freedom without rules and limits. But where mindless circuitry and drugs prevail, human connections break and emotional blindness ensues. Gone too is that key imperative of Western civilization, "Know thyself." Hal, ever the global-village explainer, logs his own symptoms: a feeling...
...basically you don't know any language at all: since you can't imagine that your own cunning little world has a boundary, the idea of stepping beyond it seems nonsensical, and so you can't begin to fathom the existence of other worlds. Her apt application of this metaphor to the experience of religion, though, finds a more comfortable home in our minds than in our collective stomach lining. No one would dispute the value of our all being in this place together in order that our knowledge should be shaped by the knowledge of others, our disciplines...
...novel is set against a larger historical metaphor: the expulsion of the Moors from Muslim Spain in 1492. Thus, the Moor's last sigh belongs both to this earlier displaced people and to the narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, nicknamed 'The Moor'. The family spice business, nearly destroyed by the bitter squabbles of one generation, is rescued by the next and eventually transformed into a fantastic and far-reaching crime syndicate. Moraes is betrayed by a beautiful vixen, imprisoned, and then released on the condition that he go to work as a goon for his father's rival crime boss. Aurora Zogoiby...
...must ask what such realizations will mean practically for volunteers committed to social services. To borrow a metaphor from Anthony Kronman, I believe it means we have to see through "bifocals" as volunteers--constantly understanding and empathizing with those whom we "serve," while conceptualizing their difficulties within a larger understanding of social organization. We must learn that all the philosophizing and social theorizing in the world does nothing if it ignores the subjective deprivations around...
...becomes tuned to the distance of the figures and to the air around them: the woman at the keyboard whose back is turned but whose absorbed face can be glimpsed in the canted wall mirror, and her teacher (or perhaps, given Vermeer's interest in music as a metaphor of harmonious love, her suitor) in black. You can gauge the depth of the room from the perspective clarity of its floor tiles. It is real, but at the end it becomes a paradise of abstraction, in the sober play of dark-framed rectangles of picture, mirror and the long...