Word: fatalistic
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...questing restlessness, an unwonted sense of contentment shows through these days. He talks about 1968 as being his last opportunity, but he is a fatalist, and his long-range future does not preoccupy him. Amidst all the talk of the new politics, the politics of reality, the politics of joy, Kennedy seems glad to be in combat again, waging the politics of restoration...
George Buechner wrote Danton when he was 21, and with all the grandiosity one would expect of a young German fatalist and revolutionary. Pronouncements follow epigrams in endless, dulling sequence. In Mueller's translation, at least, it is hard to believe that the characters could be taking themselves seriously. There is almost no psychological exposition more subtle than Danton's announcement that he is bored with the Revolution, or Collot D'Herbois' mechanical callousness...
...odder figure ever guided the destinies of the Holy Roman Empire than the Emperor Julian Augustus (circa 331-363), known as Julian the Apostate. Here was a recluse and a scholar who became a great military leader, an ascetic who preached the life of the senses, a fatalist who believed he would remake the world. More important, here was a man who did his best to write an end to Christianity before it had fairly begun. As the subject of biography he is endlessly fascinating. As the subject of fiction he has one major defect: he was an utterly irrational...
Bacon paints tragedy, and his works are both noble and enervating. Since he does not believe in life after death, he cherishes existence as a singular event: he is a fatalist taking arms against despair. "Life itself is a tragic thing," he says. "We watch ourselves from the cradle, performing into decay. Man now realizes that he is an accident, a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason...
...these modern near-tragedies could easily have been stretched into novels and good ones. Author Cicellis has chosen to contract her drama to excellent effect. What saves her from the existentialist, fatalist-futile school is largeness of heart and a glowing style. If her people are the losers of the world, they are dressed in a human dignity of her making. They may be involved in sordid little incidents, but they are also touched by tragedy, as when the modern Antigone reflects on her father: ''The guilty mess would be burnt clean, cleared of pity. She would spare...