Wound together with "Toyland," it became a poignant, even profound contemplation of the very process by which the artistic legacy of one generation is magically passed to the next.
Confronting his wife's question "What have we been so busy doing that we forgot to have the baby?," he winds himself through contortions meant to suggest profound contemplation but more like the agonies of a large, awkward bird.
And his work flows between profound contemplation and the lighthearted joy of being alive.
Abraham Verghese's first two books, "My Own Country" (1994) and "The Tennis Partner" (1999), were intelligent, sensitive examinations of health and disease, communication and loneliness; profound contemplations of the difficulty of life and the certainty of its loss.
As the book tumbles towards its conclusion, with still so many life-changing writers unquoted and profound contemplations unarticulated, Potter's footnotes become longer, as if anxious that something might be left out.
For both of those authors, the gaze was a profound moment of passionate contemplation, spiritual communication and two-way recognition: an exchange, to use one of Marmion's favorite words, in which love and knowledge passed in both directions between God and humanity.
Art Spiegelman, in "Maus," turned an unlikely medium — the talking-animal comic book — into a profound and original vehicle for contemplation of the Holocaust.
It was a moment of contemplation marred by a profound neurological malfunction.
A profound stillness descends.
