Word: proses
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Wartime Writings should add more luster to the Saint-Exupery legend, though the author might think otherwise. He was a perfectionist, accustomed to going through 25 or 30 drafts of his prose before submitting it for publication. He used language with extreme care and respect, all the while doubting its ability to communicate essential truths: "I've always thought that words were like love among tortoises -- something not well attuned as yet." This collection of letters and miscellaneous pieces would certainly strike Saint- Exupery as unpolished and riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies. It is all of that and something more...
Berger strengthens his arguments with vivid prose. No windy academic generalities here. He likes sudden beginnings: "The day before yesterday a close friend of mine killed himself by blowing his brains out." He describes Albrecht Durer's view of the Apocalypse as the day when "the sun would go out, and the heavens would be rolled up and put away like a manuscript." He reports that the mosques of Istanbul are "the colour of ripe honeydew melons." He encapsulates a special quality in Bonnard's art by calling it "an art about cultivating one's own garden...
...centerpiece of the 1986 Biennale is called "Art and Alchemy." It was curated (if that is the word) by Arturo Schwarz, an Italian art dealer whose purplish prose has long been one of the hazards of Marcel Duchamp scholarship. Alchemy sought to change base metals into gold and silver. More broadly, it embraced astrology and occult religion, being founded on the picture of a fourelement universe (air, water, fire and earth) proposed by Empedocles in the 5th century B.C. There was an early link between alchemy, technology and art, since ancient glassblowers and metalworkers were always trying to make base...
...Justice is a lively and facile writer whose literate prose stands out on a court undistinguished by the eloquence of its opinions. In one dissent he borrowed from Gilbert and Sullivan to twit his colleagues for arrogating too much power to the federal courts: "The law is the true embodiment/ Of everything that's excellent/ It has no kind of fault or flaw/ And I, my Lords, embody...
Scalia, a father of nine ("He always said he was going to have a baseball team," confides his aunt), has a deeply developed philosophy based on the principles of strict separation of powers and a disdain for far-reaching federal remedies for social problems. He has a peppery prose style and an acid pen: he once called the Freedom of Information Act "the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored." In a caustic critique of affirmative action, he facetiously proposed a system he dubbed "R.J.H.S.--the Restorative Justice Handicapping System...