Word: vividness
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Ordinarily, the spasm of savagery simply passes and recedes in time, an ugly, vivid memory. But last week, in an extraordinary moment of grace, the violence in St. Peter's Square was transformed. In a bare, white-walled cell in Rome's Rebibbia prison, John Paul tenderly held the hand that had held the gun that was meant to kill him (see cover). For 21 minutes, the Pope sat with his would-be assassin, Mehmet Ah Agca. The two talked softly. Once or twice, Agca laughed. The Pope forgave him for the shooting...
...death last week of Joan Miró, at 90, was a vivid reminder of the antiquity of modernism. The old surrealist, whose work was once so startling to received taste (a half-century ago, you did not give paintings titles like Two Figures Standing Before a Pile of Excrement without offending someone), received the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church; his death was attended by the priests whom surrealism, a profoundly Catholic movement, once despised. Miró was the last of the great modernist inventors, if you concede that neither Salvador Dali nor Marc Chagall, both still alive...
...office, Reagan has become as vivid a figure to millions around the world as he has long been to U.S. citizens, dominating TV screens not only domestically but at times internationally. Andropov has become very nearly a ghost. He has been ill for much of his single year as Party Secretary and has been absent from public view since Aug. 18. He is suffering from a kidney ailment and is rumored variously to have diabetes and pneumonia. Though diplomats believe that Andropov has visited his office several times recently and is working daily at home or in a hospital...
...vivid similarities between author and protagonist often make it difficult to separate the fictitious from the actual. When Zuckerman's hated critic, Milton Appel, accuses him of capitalizing on the ethnic eccentricities of Teaneck, N.J. and the lower East side, we cannot help but think of Roth's own battles with critics and his New Jersey origins...
...graceful prose mixes botanical information (the intricate unfolding of shagbark hickory buds), historical oddities (the Midwestern pioneers who used large, hollow sycamores as barns or even dwellings), homely anecdotes (the willow posts in a neighbor's fence that took root and grew into a row of trees), and vivid turns of phrase (the black spruce needles that grow all around the twig "like the hair on the tail of an angry cat"). Borland's concern for conservation is all the more effective for its understatement, as when he quietly notes that the scientist who measured...