Word: paroxysmic
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...then--zap--the six months are gone. The 1978-79 season was ground into the ice by a paroxysm of excitement Sunday night, as the playoffs finally sorted themselves out and the final game--number 680--determined the team with the best record...
Onstage, Gogol's characters look naturalistic enough, even transparently accessible, but it is the unseen company they keep-God, the devil and Russia-that lends them the strange dimensions of figures in fables. At one point in Marriage, a key character breaks into a paroxysm of laughter about the absurdity of just about everything. Then his face takes on an ashen look of desolation, and he says, "God have mercy on our sinning souls." Gogol uses such juxtapositions to go beyond tragedy or comedy into a realm that might be called cosmic farce...
...Cartesian quality of French art. At the time Kirchner painted his self-portrait in conscript's uniform, France had also experienced-from the other side of the trenches-the horrors of total war. But nothing by a major French painter in those traumatic years resembled Kirchner's paroxysm of self-pity-the haggard artist displaying the raw (but fictional) stump of his amputated painting hand becomes, as the nude in the background makes clear, an allegory of castration as well as loneliness and fright...
...liberation of color achieved by the Fauves was of large but finite consequence: Fauvism was not a style that could be developed. The phlegmatic Georges Braque observed, "You can't remain forever in a state of paroxysm...
Whitlam's mistake was to wage his campaign chiefly on the issue of his ouster. He claimed that the future of Australian democracy required that he be returned to office to void the Governor General's "legal coup d'état." In a brief paroxysm of rage over Kerr's action, strikers shut down slaughterhouses, construction sites and steelworks all over Australia. But before long, Australian voters decided that Whitlam's firing was not the main issue after all. Opinion polls showed that voters were more concerned about bread-and-butter issues-inflation, industrial unrest...