Word: tragical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Tragic Sense. At Berkeley, Oppenheimer also apprenticed himself to the late Professor Arthur Ryder, greatest Sanskrit student of his day. In the long winter evenings, he and a handful of other students visited Ryder's house to share his Sanskrit learning and his Stoic faith...
From Ryder, the eternal apprentice also got a new "feeling for the place of ethics." Says Oppenheimer: "Ryder felt and thought and talked as a Stoic ... a special subclass of the people who have a tragic sense of life, in that they attribute to human actions the completely decisive role in the difference between salvation and damnation. Ryder knew that a man could commit irretrievable error, and that in the face of this fact, all others were secondary." Tartly intolerant of humbug, laziness, stupidity and deceit, Ryder thought that "Any man who does a hard thing well is automatically respectable...
...circle. It is now in danger of offering a crown without a cross, a triumph without a battle, a scheme of justice without the necessity of discrimination, a faith which has annulled rather than transmuted perplexity-in short, a too simple and premature escape from the trials . . . duties and tragic choices which are the condition of our common humanity. The Christian faith knows of a way through these sorrows, but not of a way around them...
...tragedy. Welles has kept the claptrap, but his Macbeth is no once-honorable soldier whose muddled aspirations trap him into a crime against himself (the murder of King Duncan, in the play, also destroys the murderer's ability to live with himself). Orson has robbed the play of tragic impact by substituting a conniving heel who kills as he climbs...
...Tragedy] underlines the truth that human hopes must measure themselves against unfeeling necessity . . . Tragic wisdom is the knowledge of evil . . . By purging man of the original sin of self-sufficiency, tragedy makes him sociable and compassionate . . so that he can love without craving, strive without fretfulness, rise to success without falling into pride, fail without losing heart...