Word: proses
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Newspapers treasure quotes from "ordinary" people, for authenticity rather than authority. A poll, conducted at great expense with the best psephological technique, is thought to gain extra credibility if 1 out of 250 million citizens can be found to restate its findings in prose. "Seventy percent of Americans list inflation as one of their top five concerns. 'These prices are just getting out of sight,' says Judy Draper, 38, a data processor and mother of three in Molina...
...racial-speech code at the University of Michigan, along with analogous flaps at Howard, Duke and Harvard. But he rarely transcends his material; the writing is earnest, the details repetitive and the analysis predictable. Many of the best quotes and anecdotes in Illiberal Education turn out to be secondhand prose. A pivotal paragraph that argues that affirmative action lowers the self-esteem of black students is buttressed not by firsthand interviews but merely by citations from newspaper articles...
...know a woman whose son died by drowning on the night of his high school graduation. She told me she got through the weeks and months afterward by reading and rereading the works of Willa Cather. The calm and clarity of Cather's prose stabilized the woman and helped her through the time...
Television news, when it flies in raw and ragged, can be lacerating. The medium destroys sequence. Reading restores to the mind a stabilization of linear prose, a bit of the architecture of thought. First one sentence, then another, building paragraphs, whole pages, chapters, books, until eventually something like an attention span returns and perhaps a steadier regard for cause and effect. War (and television) shatters. Reading, thought reconstruct. The mind in reading is active, not passive-depressive...
...that 19th century writers should write a prose that seems so stabilizing in the late 20th. Ralph Waldo Emerson is good to have beside the bed between 3 and 6 in the morning. So is the book of Job. Poetry: Wallace Stevens for his strange visual clarities, Robert Frost for his sly moral clarities, Walt Whitman for his spaciousness and energy. Some early Hemingway. I read the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam (Hope Against Hope; Hope Abandoned), the widow of Osip Mandelstam, a Soviet poet destroyed by Stalin. I look at The Wind in the Willows out of admiration...