Word: wisdoms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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According to conventional wisdom, James Reston of the New York Times ought to rank high on Spiro Agnew's list of least favorite people. As early as the 1968 campaign, the Times infuriated Agnew by questioning his fitness "to stand one step away from the presidency." Reston, as vice president and chief political columnist of the paper, is a pillar of the Eastern liberal Establishment press that Agnew has been excoriating since 1969; the Times has often replied in stiff editorials. But during his current ordeal, Agnew has turned to Reston for counsel and a sympathetic...
What a great debt we all owe to the great philosophers! Yet, to be candid about it, in these great times who needs another great debt? For the wisdom of men like Rousseau, Nietzsche, Hegel tends to be preserved in sedimentary chapters of books more likely to be found in the attic than on the coffee table. Lives there a middlebrow who does not resent the great philosophers...
...lovers left? Just to make sure, Grass invents one, a "Dr. Doubt," a Danzig schoolteacher, who sits out World War II in a cellar, collecting snails and falling in love, among other activities. He says: "I know more now. Hesitation comes more easily." Grass's middle-aged snail wisdom might easily be mistaken for Doubt's. At 45, Grass is too wise to be possessed by any one credo. Yet Grass cannot stay in his cellar while history's hobnailed boots march overhead...
...late Auden, who spent his summers in Austria and his winters in a cluttered Greenwich Village apartment, was a graceful poet full of wisdom and knowledge, an awareness of human frailty, a persistent but not shrill hope, if not of heaven, at least of Judgment Day. He was also civilized, witty and endlessly inventive. He could write of himself without being a bore, recording "Thoughts of his own death/ like the distant roll/ of thunder at a picnic," wryly admitting that "Gluttony and Sloth have often protected him from Lust and Anger," and boasting gently that he was not vain...
...extreme, but you never lose the sense that her acts are a perfectly logical extension of her basic flaws. There are in the New York suburbs, and, of course, in other places, people, other Lesleys, who live at the edges of life, eschewing interaction for a crackpot, detached wisdom that never really weeps...