Meanwhile, many fine pages are devoted to the fine shades separating "piety" from "pity," provoking in a reader the thought that where the Christian desire was to discriminate one from the other — moral duty from moral impulse — modern humanism is essentially an attempt to return the words to a single meaning.
It is how O'Neill takes the reader through the thoughts of his damaged hero that startles.
Bate sees more continuity in Greenblatt's interest in human stories: "It is as if he has always been winking at the reader with the thought: you and I really know that books aren't really written by social forces, but by human beings".
Now, by "us" I am not referring to you, dear reader (perish the thought!), but rather the collective "us" out here blogging in the progressive trenches on the left.
For the last couple of Reacher adventures, the author has been teasing readers with the thought that some day Reacher might return to the northeastern Virginia headquarters of the elite military police unit he once ran.
Writer and artist Leah Hayes created an illustrated book, Not Funny Ha-Ha: A Handbook for Something Hard, which takes readers through the thought processes of two women who choose to have abortions -- one medical, the other surgical.
It leaves the readers with the thought that during evolution, the Pol V co-opted the RecA, piggy-backing on it to use the RecA ATPase properties for its (Pol V) own design.
But here, too, politics is never far from the reader's thoughts, even if the boys themselves aren't fully aware of how the state impinges on their childhood games.
In the field of the philosophy of history, Collingwood famously held the doctrine of 'Re-enactment': since the subject is human beings in action, the historian cannot achieve understanding by describing what happened from an external point of view, but must elicit in the reader's own mind the thoughts that were taking place in the principal actors involved in historical events.
But overall it is a dispiriting experience, one that casts the reader into thoughts of adolescent anguish, and the feeling that although one's prejudices about maladjusted teenagers are thoroughly reinforced here, not everyone goes through bad drug trips and VD, and not all teenagers are alike.
