In classical myth, in Goethe's Faust for example, and in all religious traditions, there is a clear recognition of the importance of care giving as a vital human activity.But this has been marginalised by a cultural preoccupation with independence and a profound aversion to dependence, vulnerability and need.
He describes how individual scientific obsessions, like Charles David Keeling's preoccupation with creating a precise record of carbon dioxide concentrations, produced vital puzzle pieces.
But by dramatizing his belief that the struggle in the gulf has become his main preoccupation, Obama has essentially ignored challenges that may be much more vital to the country -- and to him.
Dyer's third-rate job performance suggests a preoccupation with the Metro Rail that overshadowed the less glamorous but nevertheless vital task of efficient RTD operation and management.
Being young Southerners educated in the North, we felt Frost represented a kind of old-fashioned but indisputably authentic Americanism, vital exposure we'd grown up exiled from because of race troubles, and because of absurd preoccupations about the South itself, practiced by people who should know better.
Between 1679 and 1684 England's impotence, and the emperor Leopold I's preoccupation with a Turkish advance to Vienna, had allowed Louis XIV to seize Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Casale, and other places vital to the defense of the Spanish Netherlands, the German Rhineland, and northern Italy.
It is generally agreed that this tradition sprang out of a growing preoccupation with issues of logic and language among those Buddhists who regarded polemical engagement with their Brahmanical opponents as vital to their philosophical enterprise (see Frauwallner 1959, Hattori 1968, Hayes 1988, Matilal 1998).
Another big, new preoccupation?
But Matt Matttt was his preoccupation.
