Word: paradoxical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...something. America was built by people who came here for the right to believe in nothing. And two upcoming PBS documentaries are aptly paired not simply because each comes from one of the documentarian brothers Ken and Ric Burns (The Civil War), but also because both illustrate this paradox. Ken Burns' Not for Ourselves Alone (Nov. 7-8, 8 p.m. E.T.), the story of women suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, shows we would not be what we are without people fervently, sometimes blindly proselytizing--religiously or otherwise. Ric Burns' New York...
Hedgwick wrote that what makes life genuinely challenging is the "hedonistic paradox"--that actively seeking pleasure is one of the least effective ways of achieving it in the long...
...down on my bed, close my eyes and imagine Times Square, desolate save for Vladimir and Estragon, the stammering tramps of Waiting for Godot...waiting for the millennium that never comes. And the famous ball--by dint of Zeno's paradox--falls but never reaches its destination. It's an infinitely deferred climax, a perpetually peaking party, an existential rave...
...from unimaginably unsafe distances: what lurks behind Peacock's lengthy exposition of his Grizzly Years, though, is not the implication that his set of unusual experiences are unique but that somehow they partake of the universally shared history of the relationship between man and Nature. The naturalists resolve the paradox between the necessary subjectivity of experience and the importance of nurturing a public that believes commonly in the good of environmentalism--a public that can never share the precise set of experiences that led the naturalist himself to his environmentalist beliefs--through the figure of the representative individual, not self...
...Einsteinian revolution has produced a paradox: while vastly extending mankind's reach, it has also exposed the essentially finite nature of the human scale. Living as we do on a speck in a universe whose extent is beyond our capacity to fathom, the unprecedented growth of human power has correspondingly created an imperative for humility. It is no accident that during a life of incomparable scientific achievement, Einstein often said, "God does not play dice with the universe...