Detachment, humility and surrender, that is the ambition.
Every meal is a surrender that can be only partial, a feat of calibration.
Officers, however, flew a white flag of surrender that day outside their headquarters in the Bronx.
But it is not the surrender that hard-line critics are charging.
The opening chapter, for instance, explores restraint and plainness in poetry, qualities Longenbach describes as arising from a "surrender" that lets a poet "wither" into his proper style.
Yes, yes, there was the embarrassing fold-up to the Red Sox in the 2004 playoffs, but that was a swift surrender that took only days.
On Saturday, Taliban soldiers began turning themselves in to Northern Alliance troops in a surrender that was expected to last several days.
As for surrender, that idea has become debased: it's come to mean what the rest of us do when confronted by a work of genius.
The Arizona, sunk at Pearl Harbor, was Brooklyn-built, as was the Missouri, where the Japanese signed the surrender that ended the war.
If every concession is regarded as an unprincipled surrender that takes us inexorably farther down the road to serfdom, then nothing will get done and the nation will go bankrupt.
Greene's fundamental difficulty as a Christian was that he doubted his own ability to love God — to make the leap of faith, the unconditional surrender, that transforms a sinner into a saint.
