Word: paradoxe
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...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 of emptiness and an inability to feel pleasure...
...seem to have a cynical paradox at the heart of our political culture: "Freedom" is our official national rallying cry, but unfreedom is, for many people, the price of economic survival. At best this is deeply confusing. In school we're taught that liberty is more precious than life itself--then we're expected to go out and sell that liberty, in eight-hour chunks, in exchange for a livelihood. But if you'd sell your freedom of speech for a few dollars an hour, what else would you sell? Think where we'd be now, as a nation...
...paradox of big weather: it makes people feel important even while it dramatizes their insignificance. In some ways, extreme weather is a brief moral equivalent of war--as stimulating as war can sometimes be, though without most of the carnage...
Israel is a country premised on a paradox. It is an avowedly secular state established to promote Jewish national life, to turn the Jews, in other words, into an autonomous people like the French or the Germans. At the same time it is a Jewish state which takes as its charter the preservation and propagation of a distinctively Jewish history and heritage. And therein lies the problem...
...able performances from nearly everyone as the play moves from synod to seedy bar, from cathedral crypt to council flat. Sommer offers an adept portrayal of a man rich in feeling but poor in political skills, and Cumpsty does a marvelous job of radiating dangerous certitude. He embodies the paradox of the sort of spiritual fervor that, while ostensibly surrendering itself to a Larger Power, borders on megalomania: every cloud in the sky, every leaf on the tree, serves as a personal signal corroborating his uncompromising judgments...