Through the lines of weariness etched in his face, we know Lincoln grasped, perhaps more than anyone, the burdens required to give these words meaning.
But perhaps it's not the lack of a male gender that keeps the peace, but the ice age that has Winter in its grasp: "perhaps they use up their fighting spirit fighting the cold".
What makes "The Art of Fielding" so affecting is that it captures these people at that tipping point in their lives when their dreams, seemingly within reach, suddenly lurch out of their grasp (perhaps temporarily, perhaps forever), reminding them of their limitations and the random workings of fate.
And the remorseless self-obsession of Patrick Batemen in "American Psycho" is brilliantly undermined, in Ms. Harron's sharply satiric rendering of the book, by Cara Seymour as the prostitute who grasps, perhaps better than the audience does, what Patrick is about.
Flanner quotes at length from Lévi-Strauss's own definition of structuralism and concludes: Among highly educated French people generally, Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism is considered, in retrospect, to have been far easier to grasp — perhaps because it was a philosophy — than the methodical, apolitical manual of Lévi-Strauss's structuralism.
Perhaps, if I grasped a few more of the fundamentals of the sports I do half-watch in the interstices of sleep and chair-dancing, I'd feel less of a fraud about claiming an interest in them.
And even more than by his ideas -- many of which I didn't understand at all, but some of which I perhaps grasped better then than I do now -- I was seduced by his prose.
But they hadn't grasped – were perhaps unable to grasp – what it would soon imply.
In between, he actually tells us about basketball, which is less easy to grasp (perhaps especially for a British readership not greatly familiar with the sport's vocabulary).
This seems to be a tricky point to grasp, perhaps because many people wrongly suppose that a global economy is somehow more than the sum of the national economies of which it is comprised.
In a lifetime of playing and coaching baseball, I have found this to be one of the hardest concepts for many to grasp, and perhaps the most important.
