Word: paradoxes
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...paradox of Hans Werner Henze extends from his life to his art. A member of the progressive Darmstadt circle of composers after World War II, Henze broke decisively with the avant-garde in the mid-'50s and today sneers at the "utter boredom" of doctrinaire serialism. For all his radical leftist politics, Henze's own music is on the musical right. In a way, he is the Brahms of his day, writing in forms such as symphony, concerto and oratorio, preserving the traditional structures in the ace of the avant-gardist onslaught. Henze has mixed idioms freely throughout...
...answer is probably yes on both counts. Giamatti has a highly refined passion for paradox, a humanist sensibility that is both invoked and evoked repeatedly in every essay, and on nearly every page of this elegantly written book. Winning and bit-time athletics have apparently gone hand-in-hand, but Giamatti is capable of drawing a sharp distinction between the two, and pointing out a hidden incompatibility. Yet perhaps the primary weakness--as well as the primary strength--of this collection is the difficulty the reader shares with Giamatti of reconciling the conflicting notions he posits...
Isaiah Berlin once wrote that greatness is the ability to transform paradox into platitude...
Sadat bore with fortitude the loneliness that is inseparable from moving the world from familiar categories toward where it has never been. He raised our gaze toward heretofore unimaginable horizons. And when he had transformed the paradox and solved the riddle, he was killed by the apostles of the ordinary, the fearful, the merchants of the ritualistic whom he shamed by being at once out of scale and impervious to their meanness of spirit...
ANWAR EL-SADAT died surrounded by the weapons that made his country the most powerful of Arab nations. Yet his assassins were attacking Sadat the peace-maker, not Sadat the war-monger. In this and many other ironies of his life, Sadat was a paradox, a man to befriend you one day only to abandon you the next. Indeed, the late Egyptian ruler once flirted with Hitler's Germany, then denounced it; supported Nasser, then disowned him; courted the Soviet Union, then rejected it; and waged war on Israel only to then embrace it in conciliation. Unstable as this course...