Word: wisdoms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have for teachers, or sensei; too often students seek to imitate a teacher's style in preference to developing an individual interpretation. The innate Japanese reluctance to assert oneself in public is partly to blame, as is the strong desire to honor the sensei by reproducing their imparted wisdom. But in Western music, which prizes individuality, such cultural conditioning is a hindrance. Notes Kimura: "The principal defect of Japanese performers today is that they don't have their own strong opinions about the music they are playing...
Perhaps the only force that can embrace these opposites is the meliorism of humor, which happily abounds in this novel. The author's favorite trick is the fast shuffle, the scrambling of conventional wisdom to produce a comic insight. Describing an unconsummated love affair, Tony says that "the spirit is willing but the flesh is strong." And this wayward narrator even pretends that being funny is not what he has on his mind at all. Objecting to the word, he plans "never to chuckle, neither do I wish to be the cause of others' doing so." On this...
...filled Poor Richard's Almanac with colonial one-liners: "Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead"; "The used key is always bright." Emerson thought proverbs "the sanctuary of the intuitions." Tolstoy's knowledge of common tradition led him to an encyclopedia of wisdom. Eastern European sayings have always assumed the clarity and force of vodka: "Where the needle goes, the thread follows"; "The devil pours honey into other men's wives"; "The Russian has three strong principles: perhaps, somehow and never mind." In the epoch of the Romanoffs, wisdom was the only thing...
...Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop...
...their mother's quick remarriage to a tyrannical bishop Guve's huge brown eyes watch everything silently, building a mask to ward off the collapse of his world. Through Alexander we watch the movements of the rest of his family, particularly his grandmother (Guna Waugrea), who embodies the wisdom and vision of a true matriarch. An aging actress, she controls her family and tries to face her own mortality and loss of physical strength...