Word: tormentingly
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...occurred in man's interpretation of his deity. At first, the Christian story appears as a happy parable. One early 9th century object produced by Charlemagne's workshop is an ivory plaque symbolic of its time (see opposite page). Christ is the central figure, triumphant despite his torment on the cross. The Second Coming, which some Christians had hoped would take place in the year 1000, appears as a future inevitability to the artist. High in the iconography is the hand of God reaching down to pull men to heaven...
...amorists to supranational cool-jazz combos. In a beer garden, a band of Tyrolean-hatted minstrels is cleaving the air with Bavarian bonhomie, when suddenly the guitars are spitting like machine guns, a momentary lapse into the old Wehrmacht tunes of glory. In a sight gag of suspended comic torment, a girl blowing up a balloon reduces a Buckingham Palace guard from graven aplomb to jittering hysteria...
...simple reading was one mistake, staging it as a farce was another. The play leaves an acrid taste behind unless the inhabitants of Llareggub, Thomas's imaginary Welsh backwater, retain their basic dignity. We follow them through a typical spring day -- eavesdropping as they dream, work, gossip, wish, torment one another, and frolic in the hay -- and almost everyone is bizarre and funny. But the purpose of the tour is to change our minds, to make us see the human beings behind the aberrations. If our feelings don't change and deepen, if automatic laughter doesn't yield to compassion...
...murderers swim forever in a river of blood; the flatterers wallow in human excrement; the sowers of discord are split up the middle and stagger through eternity with their entrails hanging out. From time to time, with the brutality characteristic of his age, Dante personally assists their torment -he kicks one sinner in the face and sadistically rips out a fistful of his hair. More sympathetic episodes are artfully interspersed. In the second circle, for instance, Dante meets Paolo and Francesca and tells the touching story of their tragic love. Unhappily, the canticle concludes with a large and, to modern...
MISSION IN TORMENT, by John Mecklin. The author, who was USIS chief in Saigon from 1962 to 1964, takes a balanced second look at U.S. policy toward Viet Nam and especially toward the late Ngo Dinh Diem. Mecklin feels that the U.S. measured Diem only by his intransigence and overlooked his legitimate sovereignty, thereupon condoning the coup that unleashed warring factions and led to six more coups...