Word: musings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nonetheless, as this affecting memoir demonstrates, chemistry in the right hands can be a powerful muse. For Levi, every compound has a distinctive personality. Hydrochloric acid "is one of those frank enemies that come at you shouting from a distance . . . After having taken in one breath of it you expel from your nose two short plumes of white smoke, like the horses in Eisenstein's movies." Chemistry's periodic table, which arranges the elements according to their atomic number, is Levi's metaphor for the relationships that compose a human life. The Periodic Table consists of 21 episodes, most...
...book, he was so theoretically is a matter best known to himself." But Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal provoked an attack on both the theorists of art for art's sake and the poet: "He went in search of corruption, and the ill-conditioned jade proved a thankless muse...
...window, listening to his middle-aged frame creak, finding a suspicious bump on his scrotum, brooding about traditional marriage: "battling, shrieking and occupying each other's brains like some terrible tumor until one of them dies." A theme here? Apparently not; he goes on to muse about middle age ("On the whole we are all quite game. It's life itself that seems to be wanting"), about his comical doorman, about whether to crank up an old affair with a woman who has sent him a postcard, about the arresting fact that the Manhattan Yellow Pages are available...
Some White House aides muse that an across-the-board freeze in domestic spending would save more money and stir less passionate opposition than cuts in specific programs. But that approach would present problems too: Congress might demand that military outlays be included, while Reagan would insist that they be exempted...
...Writers may understand writing in a less esoteric way than academics." said Pelicia Lamport, who writes the honorous "Muse of the Week in Review" column about current events for the Boston Sunday Globe. As a result, a writer is often more empathetic to students with writing problems than a professor who is not an active writer, Lamport said...