What a change it is to sink into a book where big, elemental feelings are coming at you all the time, and you don't have to ponder the author's debt to French modernism or postcolonial theory.
The appeal of its theme (the revolt of elemental human feeling against the artificialities of convention), the vigour of its social criticism, and the vitality of its dialogue and characters combine to make Kabale und Liebe great theatre.
"It's a very clean, elemental look".
Is there a more elemental expression of feeling than the look on a baby's face?
In practice, illuminated as it is by Quillévéré's vivid, athletic command of image and sound, it's quite sublime: an imaginative but elemental opera of feeling, free of singing but scored with glimmering beauty by Alexandre Desplat, and probing the toughest truths of what it takes to be, and stay, alive.
But steeped in Carsoniana, he occasionally slips into her old-fashioned locutions ("And so you see that... "), or even into grandiosity (Carson has "the voice of someone standing above this elemental environment and feeling within it the slow pulse of geologic time and the mighty force of evolution that lies inside and beyond the surging waters").
But a dedicated few continued to work at it, convinced that motorized flight had eliminated a feeling of elemental conquest.
(Presumably this suggests that they were once a happy family, but I'm not buying that). Ms. Ettinger's tiered high-concept set combines industrial chic with a feeling of elemental magic.
(Presumably this suggests that they were once a happy family, but I'm not buying that.) Ms. Ettinger's tiered high-concept set combines industrial chic with a feeling of elemental magic.
What remains in my mind more clearly than anything is the sensation of standing on the pebble beach in the dark, in the mist, and staring into the sea, feeling the elemental pull – of what?
To invest this elemental grammar with such feeling is to play a game, mastered by poets from Du Fu to Louise Glück, that reminds us that the contents of the world are finite, and that the imagination obtains, often, only in combination.
