And the abiding ache of tragedy.
Savage brutality exists within its pages but so do laughter, humanity and the abiding ache of tragedy.
Matthew Dowd, a former Democrat at the heart of President Bush's re-election campaign, has a favorite quotation from Yeats taped to his office wall: "Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy".
"Being Irish," he wrote, "he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy".
But my mastery of the arcane verses of X-Clan, my sense that the decoupling of EPMD was an irreparable tragedy, and my abiding hatred of Vanilla Ice ushered me into the scowling ranks of my generation.
If any music can come close to conveying the effect of a sigh, or courage in the face of tragedy, or hope, or abiding love, it is this.
Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar Colm Tóibín 288pp, Picador, £16.99 In the introduction to this perceptive collection of essays, Colm Tóibín admits to an "abiding fascination with sadness...and, indeed, tragedy".
For guns to be taken away from peaceful, law-abiding gun owners because of a tragedy like Columbine would be a terrible mistake.
"We ask President Obama to support law abiding gun owners in this time of tragedy," it said, gathering about 57,000 signatures.
For Oscar Wilde, with his extravagant public sufferings and real physical abasement, for the scholar F. O. Matthiessen, with his tortured closetedness and eventual suicide, Toibin -- who has acknowledged what he feels is the "abiding fascination of sadness... and, indeed, tragedy" -- clearly has great sympathy in his essays.
