The incentive to devote oneself to the long-term glory of the employer was suddenly gone.
To read a book is to devote oneself to the book.
Why devote oneself to begonias? A. My specialty is herbaceous plants.
With the day-to-day worries of housing, transport, daily expenses, and medical bills, it becomes difficult to devote oneself fully to teaching.
To devote oneself to the pursuit of the latter – at all costs – is to limit one's access to the former.
To devote oneself to the form was to risk being called a conservative, a nostalgist, a manufacturer of bourgeois museum pieces; twentieth-century symphonies tended to be tonal in orientation and spacious in design, the musical equivalent of landscape painting.
It's not the simple picture of stopping work at 60 or 65, moving to Florida and devoting oneself to golf and bridge — not that it was ever totally that.
Lorr ably navigates the narcissism masked as self-interrogation, the eating disorders, platitudes, self-righteousness and general weirdness of devoting oneself so completely to something that can cause as much pain as pleasure.
The piece not only concerns Seurat's particular obsessions, but also extends itself to the problems of art-making more generally, of the detriments and dividends of devoting oneself to creative work.
The whales show up, and while a bordered box accompanying each one summarizes the bridge gibberish in layman's terms, it is difficult to enjoy "The Cardturner" without devoting oneself to an at least cursory understanding of sentences like "Dummy's got king, queen, ten of spades, and I'm sitting behind it with ace, four, doubleton".
