This month, Murong, like the film director, seems to have reached the limits of what he will bear.
What he cannot bear is how politicians of all persuasions have failed to act even as the scientific evidence of climate change mounts up, and as a result he has largely lost faith in the democratic process to handle complex issues.
A man was defined, in my father's circles, by what he could bear, the pain he could shrug off, the warmth or comfort he could deny himself".
Carr, for his part, is haunted by what he cannot bear to acknowledge in himself, by all that he has had to reject in order to preserve a sense of his own goodness.
Dr. Selwyn told the author only what he could bear to tell, in a narration honeycombed with elisions: we know little, truly, of even a close friend's interiority.
It is what he is borne of.
"Whatever the symptoms are for a concussion, that's what he had," Bears Coach Lovie Smith said.
Yet his great gift has always been less the thrill of discovery than its opposite: the comfort associated with an artist certain that what he says bears repeating.
It became too much to bear, wondering what he would have under his chin each time I turned round.
Kermode, himself an enthusiastic blogger, concedes that film criticism under the aegis of the web has become more a conversation than a series of declarations; what he can't bear to contemplate is that films also may become dialogic.
