So does the thorniness of contemporary questions of racial justice.
A notable tendency in the family is its members' adaptations to dry climates: small and crowded leaves, shortened branches, thorniness or spininess, and a low, shrubby, intricately branched habit.
"Variations" (1961) is more pleasing, not least because it channels the thorniness of "Arabesque" into a traditional form that shows Ms. Mamlok's ingenuity to better effect.
Brash dissonances dissolve into invitingly harmonized passages, which then climb back toward thorniness.
Dry-eyed and observant, it refuses to pity the aged couple at its center, played by James Cromwell and Geneviève Bujold with a magnificent thorniness.
But the thorniness of that initial question – is experimentation on one child justified if it benefits multitudes?
The relationship between mother and daughter, in all its thorniness and intricacy, is at the heart of Elizabeth Strout's new novel.
My goal is to help students understand both the complexity and thorniness of the problem, but also to give them hope by helping them break this complexity down into its constituent parts – so they realise that gentrification is constructed and man-made.
"Forty per cent of young people no longer identify as gay or straight," she'll tell us, by way of an introduction to an episode about the thorniness of labels.
"When 140 characters count as a complete thought, perhaps the occasional thorniness of a longer musical essay might reassure us that important things cannot be abbreviated," he wrote.
According to the familiar narrative, a group of composers led by Terry Riley, Reich, and Glass rejected modernist thorniness, opened themselves to pop and non-Western influences, and came home to simple chords and a steady pulse.
