Word: paradoxical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Beckett, a Stoic in a post-Romantic age, strives to find the words to face death with. The words are essential, yet they are impossible; perhaps even silence is impossible. With wrenching beauty at its climax and end, MacGowran's performance makes that terrible paradox its own only consolation. "You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me. until they say me, strange pain, strange sin ... Perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story . . . Where I am, I don't know...
...book is a complex interlacing of myth and mystery, parable and paradox, and straight description of an unusual war. At its center is a brief sketch of a now completed circle of Jewish history -from the Roman razing of the great Temple in Jerusalem and the diaspora, through the aftermath of Christ's crucifixion and Hitler's Final Solution, to the recapture of the Wailing Wall on the Temple grounds by Israeli soldiers in 1967. Outwardly, it is a cycle from defeat to victory. Inwardly, it represents the record of a profound moral dilemma. For the ancient Temple...
...only because he is a man of some profound scruples, McCarthy is an American political oddity. Perhaps no other politician has campaigned on the premise that the very act of seeking power is corrupting. This became the central paradox of his fight: he was scrupulous to avoid seeking the presidential power even while he sought it. Larner believes that McCarthy might actually have been elected President-a proposition that is debatable and unprovable. What he really means is that McCarthy could have won if he had been a different kind of man. But then a different kind of man would...
...Boll has another voice. "This is a sad country without sadness," he wrote in the magazine Der Monat in 1965, describing postwar Germany. He explores that paradox with Kafkaesque laughter in a story about an argument between a veteran who has lost a leg and an impatient bureaucrat who denies the soldier a higher pension. "I think that you grossly underestimate my leg," the veteran remarks. Then he wryly proceeds to relate how, if he hadn't lost his leg, he would have run away and not warned some officers of an impending attack. And that has actually cost...
SHIFTING to the next beer can, I could not help wonder why The Band chose to play at B.C. The audience overflowed in what is normally the school's gymnasium, but they were, in essence, a paradox of themselves, and of many rock audiences today. There was a certain incongruity in their throwing paper airplanes into the stage one minute, and applauding with what seemed to be appreciation the next. It seemed childish to shout down relief man Bobby Kosser between The Band's sets, and then to shout for an encore of The Band...