Here, at some distance from the individual traditions, we can take time with Yokai masks, hides, staffs, and instruments on a purely visual level, and, in so doing, perhaps get closer to Fréger's idea of becoming something else.
We might learn something new about him, and perhaps get closer to him, if the next time there is an Ives festival we placed a little less emphasis on his familiar -- indeed, hackneyed -- image as an "American" and an "original" and risked a greater emphasis on the dowdy, corny "substance" he shared with the composers who actually mattered to him.
'There is something definably Jewish about Roth's work,' says Jacobson, perhaps getting close to the secret, sacred core of Roth's writing.
Malcolm Bradbury, his other tutor, perhaps got close when he noticed the "quality of irrealism" and the "texture of oddity" in Ishiguro's first novel, A Pale View of Hills, which was published in 1982 and won the Winifred Holtby memorial prize.
Last fall, a young German soprano I know said something that perhaps gets closer to the specialness involved.
With that, Avery trudged off to another workout, far from the limelight of New York, but perhaps getting closer every day.
He perhaps gets closest to self-understanding in his novel The Centaur (1911), in which the protagonist Terence O'Malley, a "too-sensitive" man, is bemused by the spite and narrowness of the people who surround him.
And perhaps getting closer to an answer.
Unlike DEET or other repellents thought to confuse biting insects by masking carbon dioxide in breath and other body odors, permethrin is thought to stun or kill the bugs by disrupting their nervous systems when they bite something coated with the chemical — or, perhaps, just get close to it.
As with all good obsessions, at some point his commitment takes a slightly sordid turn: Right now, however, I can look at this image every day and thus perhaps get as "close" to this elusive woman as anyone can.
