It was a failure, in the end, of imagination and fellow feeling - a failure to imagine how it felt to be living and trapped in Rwanda at that particular moment in time.
One of her first targets, in a widely circulated 1998 essay, "The End of Imagination," was the nuclear tests India carried out that year.
To Arundhati Roy, who wrote the bestselling novel, "The God of Small Things", that threat marks "The End of Imagination", the title of her lament this month in Frontline, a fortnightly magazine.
And a particularly sweet touch is the use of authentic sea chanteys to punctuate the action; Ken Schatz, the show's music director, doubles as a cast member, starting off the songs, generally while dangling from the rigging of the ship that, by this show's end, your imagination can more or less see at full sail.
'The faith that is religious', says Dewey, '[I should describe as] the unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us and to which the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices' (1934, 33).
In his sermons from the autumn of 1989, before the Berlin Wall was toppled and Communist rule in East Germany brought to an end, the words "vision," "imagination," and "dream" appear frequently — heavily underlined or printed all in upper case.
Vendler cites the phonemic repetition in this passage about inertia from Stevens's "Plain Sense of Things": "We had come to an end of the imagination, / Inanimate in an inert savoir".
Jackson suggests that, in the end, Nicola's imagination had caused her to harm Katerina: "The vast majority of Katerina's reported symptoms do not appear to have been witnessed by health practitioners or individuals other than Mrs. de Sousa".
In the end, Marina, whose imagination has "been systematically chipped apart by years of studying inorganic chemistry and charting lipids," who has "put her faith in data," will have to navigate through a realm where reason is of no use to her and enter "a circle of hell" that requires "an entirely different set of skills that she did not possess".
