Word: paradoxical
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...masts are set in the vessel's keel, how outlandish is the gear and rigging fashioned haphazard by ancient social navigators. He is very scornful indeed of "that part of human nature which expresses itself in what is called morality," but vitiates his discussion by the employment of flippant paradox, unrepresentative facts and overstrained, somewhat splenetic deductions. For example, this very affecting statement: "The objects [not the 'tendencies'] of American civilization are to substitute cleanliness for beauty, mechanism for men and hypocrisy for morals...
When an artist finds his half drawn sketches, his blurred wanderings and unfinished efforts, exhibited in some haven of the fine arts, he can consider himself to have arrived. A strange paradox this--that a successful artist must be judged in part by work which is not even pot-boiling, but training exercises...
...observant Traveller will be able to see exactly when he leaves and when he enters the precincts of liberty. Indeed, the Swiss project, if realized, may do good service in calling attention to the unhappy paradox that the leaving is so much the pleasanter. For the home coming tourist is delayed far longer in his own harbor than in any foreign port at which he has landed. Not more rigid inspection, but merely less component maneuvers of government officials, mysterious and inscrutable, keep the Traveller alert for hours beneath the statue, his trip over, his baggage ready, his friends just...
...viscera of the age. And in the pricking he seems sometimes to follow an aimless aim; which is perfectly all right because he himself will retort that most purposes are eminent purposeless. And what he says he believes to be true. That all too human adjective belies his paradox...
...piquant cloak and no repentance in his heart, only a desire to have a look at his daughter. In the end respectability made him hers through the romance of father love, and the accident of discovering a defaulter, which set him high in Beaumont. Spiced with whimsicality and paradox, the book cannot wholly disguise the musty flavor of its meat...