The most successful chapter is a reading of Conrad's Heart of Darkness entitled "The Case of the Missing Elephants", which proceeds from the simple but powerful intuition that the story is focused on the ivory trade yet oddly silent about where ivory comes from.
Her recurring themes of loss, such as the escape that proves to be no escape, still resonate today, as does her indictment of her own milieu.To view Wharton's fiction as strait-laced, however, is to miss the elephant in the room.
To see my father's story that way would be to miss the elephant in the room--a piercing, relentless medical acumen, combined with palpable compassion.
Her article misses the elephant in the room, however.
"Everyone is missing the elephant in the room," he said.
As American lawmakers struggle to fix the economy, they are missing the elephant in the room — or, more aptly, the polar bear.
Her piece, however, like so many others that have appeared in recent weeks in The Times, misses the elephant in the room.
As soon as night fell, the jungle became so dark, the undergrowth so impenetrable, that I could have easily missed an elephant, let alone a stealthy jaguar hiding behind the nearest tree.
But the witch-hunt against their wrongdoing currently under way in Argentina's courts entirely misses the elephant in the room – the uncomfortable fact that Argentina's entire political establishment is rotten to the core, from left to right and back again.
Apparently, around about the time we lost the ability to see the forest for the trees (which we are incessantly cutting down, by the way), we also confronted the threat -- according to poet John Godfrey Saxe -- of missing the elephant for its parts.
We feel whole again -- at least some of the time; compared to the constant sense of loss or something missing or elephant in the room when living as a family after loss, the moments of balance that occur are a real blessing.
