Word: weightless
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...dumb brilliantly, even gets run over by a steamroller and lives to yell about it -- at least until he is blown off the wing of an ascending airplane. Somehow, the admirable Crichton, a veteran director of postwar Ealing comedies (The Lavender Hill Mob), contrives to keep the cruelty as weightless as an animator's cel. Wanda defies gravity, in both senses of the word, and redefines a great comic tradition...
...pedigree of astrology in ancient times had a certain splendor. But astrology has been intellectually weightless since Isaac Newton. Yet it accomplished a miraculous revival around the turn of the century. King Edward VII (Scorpio) and Enrico Caruso (Pisces) consulted astrologers. The '60s, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, brought in the great age of astral tourism...
...does not bully the reader with tortuous grammar, or leave gaps and ambiguities in his logic as examples of the defects in language itself; his sentences are clear and simple. "There is a lightening of language," Calvino posits, "whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarefied consistency...
...peculiarly powerful form of gravitas may arise out of suffering. It draws its authority not only from the redemptive example of Christ but also from Greek tragedy: the terrible moral power of woe. Mother Teresa has that gravitas of the redemptive. Whole cultures may be judged weighty or weightless by the calibration of suffering. Russian history sometimes seems an entire universe of gravitas: always there is the heavy Slavic woe, the encroaching dark and metaphysical winter...
...Jimmy Carter did not. Nor did Gerald Ford. Richard Nixon displayed a bizarre and complex gravitas that destroyed itself in sinister trivialities. Does Ronald Reagan have gravitas? In some ways, Reagan seems a perfect expression of the anti-gravitas America of the late '80s, a place that can seem weightless and evanescent, as forgetful as a television screen. Gravitas, a deep moral seriousness, is not necessarily the virtue for an electronic age. And yet Reagan possesses a gravitas of authenticity. In any case, lame ducks always suffer from diminished gravitas. People don't take them as seriously as before, when...