Word: apercus
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...prose itself is rich and carefully crafted, and it includes some amazing turns of phrase which must be read in context to be fully appreciated. Along the way there are a series of (apercus) of varying profundity. Eberstadt is an accute observer of the intellectual and social snobbery which prevails among the wealthy young. Mocking the common assumption that to be sophisticated is to be blase, unflappable, Jem says, "It's not glamorous not to be shocked. It's autistic." (The pun on artistic should not be lost on those who have ever tried this route to social chic...
...Vliet's Water and Stone is a deceptively quiet collection of near, image-rich work, largely what might be described as observations ("In a Photograph by Brady") or apercus ("The Shade," "Girls on Saddleless Horses"). There is also, incidentally, some particularly chilling cancer imagery in various places ("...cobalt's/basilisk stare, the destroyed blood"; "the crab/under the heart, the thickening node"); and the death-soaked title work, a sort of Japanese No drama, is frighteningly memorable...
Democracy makes every man forget his ancestors. So thought De Tocqueville, the observer who for more than a century trapped the American character in his shrewd apercus. That character is too mutable to stay contained. Today it is frantically climbing family trees. After Haley's comet, not only blacks but all ethnic groups saw themselves whole, traceable across oceans and centuries to the remotest ancestral village (see LIVING...
Updike is too talented to write un distinguished fiction, and A Month of Sundays contains more than its share of finely wrought apercus: "In the end, fashion overcomes personality: all the mistresses of Louis XV look alike...
...reader, reputed to have a speculative, even impractical mind, and notorious as a bad scientist, seizes on such sentences and enters them in a notebook crammed with similar apercus. In this act, and in its cause (here, Eddington's observation), the reader's temperament is revealed, a temperament at once impatient and imbued with languor, undiscipfiined and ordered. It conspires to receive all ideas as echoes of other ideas, on a diachronic level. In other words, whenever the reader happens to notice an idea which resonates through time, associations clamor like heirs to be recognized, and a number of them...