Word: tails
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Long Day's Journey into Night. Life is depicted by primitives as a serpent that eats its own tail. The serpent signifies a state of being in which pleasure and pain, life and death, eating and being eaten are the same thing. To a primitive, this state is paradise. To a conscious man. it is madness. To Eugene O'Neill, it was home. And this home, the family that nourished and devoured him, that cosseted and tortured him to greatness, the playwright has described with withering hatred and burning pity and heartsick unutterable despair in a tragedy that...
...height of their absurdity, in the humanity of their inhumanity. But if there is revelation there is no development. In a kind of folie à quatre they go over and over and over the same ground, and end where they began-like the serpent that eats its own tail...
...Gallagher tried hair from the heads of Orientals. No good. He tried coarse eyebrow hairs. Not much better. Then he found that hog's hair was scaly enough to cause clotting, and stiff enough to be fired from the gun. So is hair from a horse's tail...
...Having reason to hide her condition," writes Dr. Bauer, "the unwed mother attempts to conceal her enlarging abdomen by pulling in her buttocks, much as the cowed dog tucks his tail between his legs. This flattens the abdomen and reduces the lumbar lordosis [curvature of the lower spine]. In this position the fetus lies more parallel to the maternal spine and the abdominal muscles are less stretched." By contrast, "the married mother carries her pride before her like a banner, and drags behind her a crippling backache which often becomes chronic...
Here is the Assistant Commissioner in action, as his men close in on a murderer: "A line of heavy men in soft hats walking cumbrously on tiptoe; only the Assistant Commissioner at the tail of the procession walked with natural lightness, all the useless flesh burned away by fever." In that ridiculous and wonderful fever, Greene's genius and fudge blend inextricably-each necessary, both unmatchable...