All 4 Uses of
intractable
in
Absalom, Absalom!
- Oh yes, I watched him, watched his old man's solitary fury fighting now not with the stubborn yet slowly tractable earth as it had done before, but now against the ponderable weight of the changed new time itself as though he were trying to dam a river with his bare hands and a shingle: and this for the same spurious delusion of reward which had failed (failed?†
Chpt 5tractable = easily managed
- his escape or exit as inexorably as a Spanish duenna, teaching him to chop wood and to work the garden and then to plow as his strength (his resiliency rather, since he would never be other than light in the bone and almost delicate) increased—the boy with his light bones and womanish hands struggling with what anonymous avatar of intractable Mule, whatever tragic and barren clown was his bound fellow and complement beneath his first father's curse, getting the hang of it gradually and the two of them, linked by the savage steel-and-wood male symbol, ripping from the prone rich female earth corn to feed them both while Clytie watched, never out of sight of him, with that broodin†
Chpt 6intractable = difficult
- It would not be intractability and maybe you couldn't call it pride either, but maybe just the self reliance of mountains and solitude, since some of his blood at least (his mother was a mountain woman, a Scottish woman who, so he told Grandfather, never did quite learn to speak English) had been bred in mountains, but which, whatever it was, was that which forbade him to condescend to memorise dry sums and such but which did permit him to listen when the teacher read aloud.†
Chpt 7
- ...as if he were trying to explain it to an intractable and unpredictable child:
Chpt 7 *intractable = difficult to manage or control
Definition:
difficult
in various senses, including:
- of problems or disease -- difficult to solve or cure
- of people or animals -- difficult to manage or control
- of materials -- difficult to manipulate