Word: paradoxes
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Basque-born Unamuno had a Spanish flair for paradox-he insisted that the fictional Don Quixote was a greater and a realer man than Don Quixote's creator, Cervantes. This kind of jugglery between the balloons of fiction and the cannonballs of fact made Unamuno an enigmatic figure-and in Catholic, reactionary Spain, a suspect and controversial one. In 1891, when he was 27, he became professor of Greek at Salamanca, and was appointed rector ten years later. He stoutly rejected any obligation to impose coherence on his thought and backed up his stand by the consistent inconsistency...
...filled apartment in Manhattan's East 80s, or met his nine-year-old daughter Isabel, or two sons, James 16, and Roger 14. A prodigious reader and prolific writer, Barzun has seen fit to arrange his routine with an almost classic precision. But this is something of a paradox, for Barzun's chief interest as a cultural historian has been not classicism, but romanticism...
What to do about the paradox? The solution, for the nations of Western Europe: European union, "one of the greatest dreams of Western man . . . Without such unification . . . Europe could go on in dreary repetition, possibly to the ultimate destruction of all the values these people themselves hold most dear." Moreover the whole "community of freedom" would be more independent, prosperous and secure with the fostering of mutual trade, the advancement of "legitimate political and economic aspirations," a mutual understanding of cultural traditions, and a promise of assistance to weaker nations by the stronger...
...horrors Hitler made, it is possible that the war on the Eastern front was the worst. It is a proper paradox that the worst has inspired the best in postwar German fiction. Two recent samples...
...nasty slash of paradox defaces this pretty picture: though membership of the American Federation of Musicians last week stood at an alltime peak of 256,000, there are fewer jobs for U.S. musicians every month...