Word: paradoxical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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McEwan goes beyond Conrad in his exploration of human psychology. He notes that bestial hatred and spiritual ecstasy are flip sides of the same coin: one begets the other. Sex best illustrates this paradox--in the tender, familiar love-making of the two couples and the vile bestial encounter with the dogs we are presented with the two ends of the scale. Even more frightening than the darkness is the idea that all good is dependent upon...
...scratch any aggressive tribalism, or nationalism, you usually find beneath its surface a religious core, some older binding energy of belief or superstition, previous to civic consciousness, previous almost to thought. Here is the paradox of God-love as a life-force, the deepest well of compassion, that is capable of transforming itself into a death-force, with the peculiar annihilating energies of belief. Faith, the sweetest refuge and consolation, may harden, by perverse miracle, into a sword -- or anyway into a club or a torch or an assault rifle. Religious hatreds tend to be merciless and absolute. The mystery...
Instructor in Anaesthesia Dr. Jesse D. Roberts, Jr., a member of Zapol's research group, said the discovery also explains why mountain climbers short of breath often claim that smoking cigarettes makes them stronger. The seeming paradox may be due to the presence of nitric oxide in cigarette smoke...
...will ever know whether or not Weinberger lied to Congress, even though a grand jury concluded there is reason to believe that he did. There is an inherent paradox in pardoning a suspect before he or she has been convicted of a crime. Semantically, a pardon cannot exist without an accompanying misdeed. A pardon is meant to be the last word on a case--a final chance at leniency. In Caspar Weinberger's case, the pardon is the first word...
...most vital processes. Cell division slows drastically. Even hair stops growing. Reduced fuel burning drives body temperature down; that, combined with the loss of insulating fat, can lead to death from hypothermia -- a threat on a cool Somalian evening. The shutting down of the intestines can lead to the paradox of death by diarrhea. Reduced production of white blood cells weakens the immune system, a kind of starvation-induced AIDS that turns diseases like measles into killers. Eventually the body begins burning muscle tissue wholesale: victims become too weak even to move, and the heart muscle begins to shrink...