Word: saneness
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...allies. There are, however, imponderables in the equation. A Communist in a Chinese radio station might think up a political slogan worth six aircraft carriers or a large steel plant. The relative superiority of the U.S., while certain by military standards, is only probable by overall strategic standards. A sane Communist could conclude that Russia's strength equals or surpasses that...
Sealskin in the Bathtub. The world has never been notably sane, but it exists under the convention that it is-just as in certain families there is an agreement not to notice that a "peculiar" aunt wears three hats to the breakfast table and a sealskin coat in the bathtub. Waugh's world simply ignores that convention. Lunacy is its norm, evil is without guilt, pain without pathos, and tragedy is comedy. Yet, in lucid intervals, the real world and Waugh's world are seen in part to be one. The degree to which they are so measures...
Tear-Jerker. Ophelia is not an easy role, nor is it any too clearly written. Most actresses who try it (besides being old enough to spank Polonius) are likely to play the sane scenes like mad scenes and the mad scenes like a little-theater production of Ring Lardner's Clemo Uti, or the Water Lilies...
Jean Simmons was only 18 when she played Ophelia. She plays the sane scenes with a baffled docility, a faint aura of fey, and a tender suggestion of nascent maturity. All this may go a long way toward persuading 20th Century audiences that a young girl really could so sedulously obey a meddlesome old father, and really could lose her mind when her estranged lover killed him. She plays the mad scenes as if she had never heard that Ophelia is one of Shakespeare's most shameless tearjerkers, and as if her lovely language and her cracked, ribald little...
...Thus he was able to measure the way the brain uses up its chief sources of energy: oxygen and glucose. Already he has demonstrated that unconscious patients use only half the normal amount of oxygen and glucose, that schizophrenics use as much oxygen for their irrational thinking as a sane person does for normal thinking...