Word: lessers
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There must be. Most of mankind's religions and philosophies are aimed at steeling humans for the ultimate loss, plus the lesser defeats that lead up to it. Most of the authenticated sages?quite a few losers among them? emphasize a very ancient idea: because the loser alone controls his attitude, he can always change that attitude and regard defeat as unimportant. "Our life," wrote Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor-philosopher, "is what our thoughts make...
...George Orwell should have been a Blimp. Born Eric Blair, into a military-official family, he went on scholarship to a spartan prep school designed to groom likely lads for their destined place in the Establishment. Like any dutiful upper-class English boy, he journeyed East to govern the lesser breeds as an officer in the Burmese police. The experience was decisive. His sketch Shooting an Elephant is a picture in microcosm of two imperial centuries of interracial injustice and violence. Unlike most people, he could take it but he could not dish it out. Back home on leave...
...passed from Bach to Beethoven to Wagner to Schonberg (or the Devil) and then to sleep. The common antinomy sets Schonberg against Stravinsky, coalescing all music into two schools in a priceless display of Manichaean passion. Schonberg is seen as the seminal prime mover, and Stravinsky [and to a lesser extent Berg and Bartok] are seen as creative but dead-end derelicts...
...rarely presented with ideal presidential candidates. The very nature of party politics dictates compromise candidates, and the voter can do no more-or less-than to choose at the time he is given a choice. Perhaps unfairly, many voters regard the alternatives in 1968 as a choice between the lesser of two (or three) evils. Even so, making a choice is imperative; obviously if one rejects a lesser evil, the greater may prevail. Thus the nonvoter is morally just as responsible for the result as if he had voted for the candidate he abhors. Edmund Burke put it well...
...lesser girl, say Lady Macbeth, might panic, but not Dorothy. She just launches Lewis on a film career, marries Paul, and the three of them live togather happily ever after. "Obviously I would have trouble stopping Lewis from killing people," she sighs, "but with a little supervision and luck...