Word: conundrum
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Textbook Psychosis. Muriel Spark has written another riveting small novel that displays her elliptical style and uncanny control of an abruptly shifting narrative. As always, too, she is something of a conundrum. Critics have likened her to writers as varied as Isak Dinesen and Evelyn Waugh. Normally confident commentators grope helplessly to describe the seductions of her stories, citing her wit, her urbanity, her Roman Catholic convictions...
...head, then someone's heart. The sensitive man can only say: "If I scream, you will say that I am barbarous; If I whisper, you will not hear me; If I speak normally, you will say that I am indifferent." A great poem, a Vietnam headline, a back-page conundrum all appear the same- mute and urgent; just as a general, a soldier- killing or being killed- and a huckster are all the same size, volume, and duration on television, that magnificent annihilator of moral distinction, which cuts us even as we ignore it. We consume our words, our dead...
Faculty members and some students concentrated on what Louis Loss, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, called the "means-ends conundrum...