When you contemplate great tragedy and have the luxury of distance, it can be comforting to think in generalizations and absolutes.
Over the past week, Americans have contemplated the great divide that separates life before the hijacked planes plowed into the twin towers and the Pentagon with life after.
During the trip, I contemplated the great moment I was about to experience.
Another rung down the ladder of absurdity, you may also contemplate the great cream-cheese-as-N.C.A.A.-violation dilemma, which might actually be coming to an end.
Mr. Bowie paired old songs with their new relatives; "Rebel Rebel" was followed by "New Killer Star," which contemplates "a great white scar over Battery Park".
"It is impossible to contemplate any great Astronomical discovery without feelings closely allied to a sensation of awe," the first article began.
In her 1977 book "On Photography," Susan Sontag could contemplate, with great alarm, a world overrun by the static images reproduced in magazines and newspapers and on advertising billboards, a dystopian intimation that now seems downright quaint.
Gregory Jones, head of tax for KPMG on the Isle of Man, warns that such a climate demands that taxpayers treat any strategy they might contemplate with great circumspection, because that is how the authorities will treat it.
If he were ever to get fit and hold down a first-team place his chance could come under McClaren but the manager, at heart, will not be contemplating a great upheaval.
They may borrow Adderall from a friend to work harder, or Xanax to reduce anxiety; they may use cocaine to have more fun at a party or ayahuasca to contemplate the great questions of life.
The other day, I sat with Sir András Schiff, the Hungarian-born, British-based pianist, in a practice room at Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, contemplating a great musical mystery: the trill in the eighth measure of Schubert's Piano Sonata in B-Flat, D. 960.
