Word: selflessness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...those embarrassing words, perhaps a word more embarrassing even than "morality"... It has, nonetheless, a firm, hard-headed sense that names the single quality without which true art cannot exist... We read or listen to or look at works of art in the hope of experiencing our highest, most selfless emotion, either to reach a sublime communication with the maker of the work, sharing his affirmations as common lovers do, or to find, in works of literature, characters we love as we do real people...
...involve more people than those of other cities, so they're harder to cope with. Even if the borough, and New York City itself, had the most capable, honest and dedicated leaders, it would probably founder helpless before such massive social forces. And Brooklyn doesn't have such selfless and creative leadership: it is a machine city, and the Democratic organization hands out political plums for services rendered...
...lunched with old agency colleagues, who gave him a long, standing ovation and, over his protests, passed around a pot for money to help him pay his fine. He seemed to be wryly accepting the next chapter of a spy's life. Instead of a medal for brilliant, selfless service, he was convicted of a misdemeanor...
...heroes to some. That may be understandable?though scarcely excusable?in the case of revolutionaries who claim to represent the aspirations of persecuted or neglected minorities. But many West Germans are furious that leftist papers in Europe have glamorized Baader and other gangsters of the Red Army Faction as selfless radicals acting on behalf of an ideological cause...
...philosophical rather than the mundane and perhaps it is the voyeur in us that is left feeling unfulfilled. We learn about Neruda, the poet-philosopher, but little about Neruda, the fallible man, demystified and much like us. The impression left from the Memoirs is of a man almost too selfless, too moral, too forgiving. His only flaw seems to be a culturally-determined sexism...