Word: tragic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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William Butler Yeats feared a world in which "the best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." Yeats would see it as tragic that pit-dwellers feel their suburban angst more passionately than Harvard students feel touched by art or philosophy. We can yet disprove Yeats' fears, so long as we remember that intellectual rigor and our desire for mastery in dealings with others need not preclude a healthy sense of intensity, longing, curiosity and wonder...
...tragedy. NATO knew there would be civilian casualties during the air war, and when they occurred, "we had all agreed we wouldn't jump the gun and say things" before knowing for sure who was responsible, said the aide. Clark's gaffe handed Belgrade a propaganda windfall: a tragic accident that became a weeklong media flap over NATO credibility...
...think it is a tragic calculation that Clinton has sacrificed our honor and credibility on this issue," Barbour said, adding that the United States had no nationalinterests in Kosovo...
...also the eventual realization that the photograph seems almost completely unnecessary. The picture of Hemingway the man, down to the vague disapproval in the lips that seems to mask some deep sadness, springs fully formed from the pages of his fiction. Does it shock any reader of those tragic and romantic books, stately and muscular, that Hemingway's fingers are thick and his glasses a severe but stylish stainless steel? A man already visibly present in his works became nearly inescapable at the centennial, in the actual shadow of his huge iconic face, and the myths that surrounded his life...
...lost love is a self-destructive genius. Her new husband is a fussbudget academic. Caught between them, Annette Bening's tragic heroine suffers a kind of influenza of the soul--fevers and chills alternating while she tries to maintain her politesse in provincial society. This is risky work for a movie star, but Bening's understated tension is admirable, and so is Jon Robin Baitz's new adaptation, touching Ibsen's glum dramaturgy with rueful Chekovian absurdity. Daniel Sullivan's brisk production, running through mid-April at Los Angeles' Geffen Playhouse, is full of lively performances bobbing eccentrically along...