Word: rigor
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...explored all the possible meanings of his actions, his dreams, and his words. The intellectual rigor of the Jew cannot admit silence. Nor can he accept the silence of a people who have accomplished all their tasks motivated by just words, never by the irrationality of impulse...
...suppressed writings on such innocent topics as the "Poetics of Plot and Genre" in classical Greek literature are gradually being rescued from oblivion by young linguists in the Soviet Union. But until the rescue is complete, Freidenberg, who died in 1955, will be remembered as the tough-minded and rigorous scholar who gave her inspired cousin a 44-year sampling of her critical intelligence. Her rigor melted only once, when she read Doctor Zhivago for the first time. She wrote Pasternak: "This book must be possessed rather than read, as a man does not read a woman but possesses...
...shared by all the experts on whom Schell relies in building his argument. Moreover, many of those who agree with Schell have been making much the same point for a long time. So the thesis is neither indisputable nor original. But Schell makes his case with a combination of rigor, intensity and boldness that is all too rare in expositions of nuclear...
There was at first a certain shivery merriment, a sense of shared rigor. "For a few hours," E.B. White once wrote of extreme cold's onset, "all life's dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive." But as the cold settled in, White's "clear and congenial task" proved too much for some of the frail and the elderly, for luckless travelers exposed for too long a time to the bite of winter. By week's end more than 230 people had died, victims of hypothermia (low body...
...course, its effect is the reverse of irony; one cannot have irony without rigor. Instead, it turns into the defensive chumminess that is one of the hallmarks of provincial art-the trade unionism of the In joke. Such longueurs threaten but do not overwhelm the effort to improve coast-to-coast cultural communication. This show is well worth seeing; and it will do a lot to dispel the faint condescension which, in some quarters, still clings to mere clay. -By Robert Hughes