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Origins was more than a theory, it was a performance. Every page bristled with challenges. Arendt could crowd more into a paradox than some colleagues could set down in a volume: 'In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would . . . think that everything was possible and that nothing was true." Totalitarian movements "conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself." In a totalitarian state, "the innocent and the guilty are equally undesirable." The narrative was marred by inconsistencies—too little attention was paid to Stalin's lethal excesses, for example, a flaw corrected in later editions. But the book's originality, its amalgam of political analysis and literary criticism of figures as disparate as Proust and Lawrence of Arabia, gave it the freshness and immediacy of art.
Arendt entered the political vocabulary; it was impossible to discuss modern history without confronting her great structure. The style was set for her other works: On Revolution, The Human Condition, Men in Dark Times. All of them subtly examined the differences between the mass and the mob, and searched for the contingencies that formed the modern temper. By 1954 she was famous enough to star in Randall Jarrell's comic novel, Pictures from an Institution, thinly disguised as Mrs. Rosenbaum: "She looked at the world like a bird, considering; and you, too, considered; but you could not make up your mind whether she was a Lesser Bird of Prey or simply a songbird of some dismaying foreign kind."
Young-Bruehl is particularly acute in her analysis of the bird's personal and marital style. "When we were young enough to have children, we had no money," recalled Arendt. "And when we had money, we were too old." Her books became the Blüchers' "children of the mind." She overlooked Heinrich's flirtations; he regarded her affectionately as "the meteor." Together they were rulers in what Jarrell dubbed the "Dual Monarchy," presiding over a circle of artists and historians.