Word: shudder
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Perhaps it is inevitable that whenever the arts broaden their appeal they will compromise their quality. If enough people tell us that Star Wars is a great movie we begin to question our own standards of taste. One has to shudder when a youngster today lumps Elvis Costello and The Bee Gees together with the Beatles and Beethoven as "great musicians," and wonder how many years until the latter two no longer make the list. Certainly the cultural elite will always recognize Beethoven's immortality, but if the 1970s taught any lesson, it was that economics is always the bottom...
...years or so, collectors, dealers, auction houses and their willing accomplices, journalists, have been moved to pleasure, then wonder, and now to a sort of popeyed awe at the upward movement of art prices. If art was once expected to provoke un nouveau frisson, a new kind of shudder, its present function is to become a new type of bullion. Thus, we are told by art industry flacks, people now respect art. They flock to museums to see it; its spiritual value has been confirmed, for millions, by its wondrous convertibility into cash. You can't argue with...
Admittedly, modern times are fraught with real hazards, and no sensible person would sniff at prudent precautions. Still, it is hard not to shudder at the sheer volume of disquieting cautions, at the constancy, variety and intensity of the fearful clamor. Indeed, one may reasonably wonder whether the very climate of alarm itself has not become a hazard to health and serenity. Everybody's psyche now takes a drubbing day in and out from the concatenations of danger. An American can scarcely make a move nowadays without being pushed into a state of alert...
...been broken by the experience and could denounce the U.S. at a staged spy trial. Charles Fenyvesi, one of the Hanafi hostages in 1977, writes in the New Republic that "had the siege gone on much longer, some of us would have broken down, one way or another. I shudder to think what more than 30 days of captivity might have done...
...would not undermine Egypt or the peace treaty; they would go on shipping oil through the canal and the Suez-Mediterranean pipeline, and the $2 billion that they and Kuwait have in the Central Bank of Egypt would not be pulled out. The reason, says the aide: "The Saudis shudder at what is happening in Iran. They are beginning to understand the meaning of peace...