Word: soberness
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...literary tradition. Good writing by Americans about prep schools-The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss and A Separate Peace by John Knowles-is very serious indeed, perhaps because Americans are less comfortable with the idea of a separate, elitist education for the upper middle class. It is this sober-faced genre that Yates follows, at a distance. The tone of his novel is that of a man looking back wearily from middle age and thinking, "Ah well, it can't have been so very bad. We all survived, didn...
...risk is the desperate and chaotic experience of a man not in command of his tongue." The principal influence on Macke was French: the paintings of Delaunay, like A Window, 1912-13, which had been seen in Berlin in 1913. Its light-filled space, saturated with color-not the sober browns and grays of cubism, but the full radiance of the spectrum from high yellow through to ultramarine, with a vestigial slice of trusswork from the Eiffel Tower rising in the top third of the painting to remind one that this was a view of Paris-made a deep impression...
...very few times that lacocca came close to having egg on his face. After 32 years with Ford, the plain-spoken son of an Italian immigrant was a Horatio Alger-hero on wheels, a paradigm of upward automobility. Yet unlike others who have risen through the sober, polyester-clad ranks of America's most important industry, lacocca is perpetually outspoken, fashionably dressed in European worsteds and as obviously at ease in a barroom throbbing with used-Ford salesmen as in a hearing room full of Senators. If humans can be said to have automotive analogues, lacocca suggests nothing...
...advice to writers contains both wit and sober utility: "Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial . The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it ... Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honor requires that one break off only at an appointed moment . . . Avoid everyday mediocrity. Semirelaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading." Benjamin ends his list with "The work is the death mask of its conception...
Since productivity is a key indicator of a nation's economic vigor, the figures issued last week by the Labor Department made sober reading. According to the study, 25 of 66 major industrial groups showed outright declines in the hourly output of their workers in 1977. As a whole, the rate of rise in productivity in the manufacturing sector slowed markedly last year to only 2.2%, vs. 6.8% in 1976. The biggest drops were in clay-working (down 7.4%), grain-milling (7.1%) and footwear (4.3%) industries. Productivity in the coal industry fell...