Word: surfeits
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...lyrical self-examination, during the exhaustion of shame through to the reassertion of resolve. It is the tone of Achilles by the sea, of the first speeches of Samson Agonistes. Volume is not anger, humiliation, or passion. The voice of beauty is quiet, intense. Mr. Snyder delivered a surfeit of apostrophes, read too many end-stopped lines, and tended to pause too long on the caesturas. But Miss Yakutis perfectly captured Cleopatra's shock at her power to lead Antony to desert and thus betray himself in this scene. It is the moment of deepest learning on her part...
Adding to the surfeit of facts is another problem???-the authors prose style. The book is made ??? the kind of durable, unpretentious journalese that ??? has filled newspapers for years. It is clear, usually ??? concise, and rarely awkward or bumbling. But since ??? it lacks any literary sparkle of its own, it mean ??? that each paragraph is only as interesting as the ??? events being described. In The Harvard Strike, tha ??? makes for a few high points and quite a few lows...
That is undoubtedly part of it. "The price of eternal vigilance," says Marshall McLuhan, "is indifference." In the same way, the cost of constant excitement, of a persistent and violent rearrangement of one's sense of order, results in surfeit. The mind is overcome by a kind of compassion fatigue. The events of the '60s have profoundly disturbed the American sense of reality. The longest war in the nation's history, with the American combat dead and wounded last week passing 300,000, seems at once horribly strange and grimly familiar. All too accustomed to daily deaths...
Hardly anyone can quarrel with the ideal of a healthy sexuality, free of false shame and guilt. Yet to judge from the nation's mood, a great number of Americans feel that the surfeit of sex must somehow be contained. Unless some restraints are imposed?or self-imposed?history suggests that the reaction to permissiveness may be strong. The ribald, rollicking Elizabethan age was succeeded by the severity of King James I and the censorious society of Oliver Cromwell. The excesses of the Restoration were sobered by Victorian propriety. The licentiousness of Weimar Germany ended in the austere and brutal...
...political rallies. Last week they ran a $2,790 newspaper ad in New York showing six young men standing before a building with clubs in hand. In an age of Black Panthers, white vigilantes, and apparently millions of armed and angry individuals, there would already seem to be a surfeit of quasi-military partisans. Threat, however, tends to breed counterthreat. Out of the people traditionally identified with the word ghetto has come an unusual group called the Jewish Defense League-whose members posed before a synagogue for last week's ad and called themselves "nice Jewish boys...