Word: paradox
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...humanistic view of life's pleasures and follies. Brimming with a youthful freshness and ardor, the seamless music of Falstaff could have been written only by a man well versed in the ways of the world. Giulini's interpretation went straight to the heart of this central paradox: fleet and light when it had to be, yet suffused with touching sympathy for Shakespeare's fat, amorous knight. It was comic in the Dantean sense...
...balance between the imperatives of American policy and various factors of international relations, particularly the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. While those international tensions cannot be eliminated, they can be, and have been in the past, kept in a state of overall equilibrium. But it is an equilibrium with an underlying paradox: by their very nature, nuclear weapons are military instruments too powerful and destructive to "solve," in any meaningful and positive sense, political problems that confront the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Yet they are also too pow erful...
...ponderous works as Last Tango in Paris and 1900 attempts, with The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, to return to the earlier sparse style which marked his powerful 1969 film The Spider's Strategem. Unfortunately, Bertolucci's recent film cannot match such earlier efforts, and its attempt to study paradox and ambiguity flounders in a self-conscious plot which even the wonderful lead actor and fine cinematography cannot salvage...
This conclusion rests on a paradox that Wills insists on throughout The Kennedy Imprisonment: power is debilitating, and power as conceived by the Kennedys is especially so. The driven patriarch gave his sons the means and the marching orders to impose themselves on the world: "They need not scramble, or be predators. They would live on the heights to which he lifted them." The result of this freedom, Wills argues, was utter confinement...
Much of Levitation presents Ozick in the role of a woman wonder-rabbi spreading paradox and fantasy. She tries too hard. Fantasy requires a softer touch and more control than are found in these stories. Some of Ozick's figurative language is spell-breaking. The phrase "suckled the Nazi boot" seems to have dropped from a punk rock lyric. A "transient mirage" that teases the "medulla oblongata" is not only overwrought but inappropriate for this part of the brain...