Word: witness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wit to vice and elegance to lust...
MALLON'S DISC-JOCKEY style of tour through his chosen diarists is amply anticipated by an introduction that rambles on (without any of that great Rambler Samuel Johnson's wit) about the progress of his own diary and his own rather banal generalizations about the practice of keeping a diary. Also included by way of introduction are generous quotations from his own diaries, such as a passage which he agrees is "pretty self-pitying stuff" written while Mallon lived near Harvard Yard and was "tired out from a semester of trying to learn Greek." It seems quite inappropriate that...
...however: his desire for incorporeality, that the "artist must manage to make believe that he never existed," is never quite achieved in any of his fiction and completely betrayed by his published correspondence. Flaubert's letters, in which profound statements on art and deeply personal confessions coexist with mordant wit and bloodcurdling obscenity, constitute as full a self-portrait of the artist as we are likely to get from any writer...
Unfortunately, the line between being quick and being sharp is a fine one. Knee-jerk wit beats a certain resemblance to a handgun in the possession of a child--you don't know whether it will go off, and you don't know who it may hit. Knee-jerk wit may go a long way toward explaining our reputation for arrogance. The image of the stuck in Harvard student has always bothered like too many of my colleagues to understand how we have managed to maintain this distressing image...
...sympathy. I rankly, I've been stuttering for a long time, and I'm used to it. Harvard students are not the only people who respond in this fashion. People are usually confused when confronted by my difficulty, as they would be by any unusual situation. Knee-jerk wit is a common reaction; however, the results of my unscientific survey reveal that more Harvard students react this way than do a random sample of those not blessed with Centers phones...