Word: absurdities
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...says Menen, until the Arabians sparked "the rebirth of learning" by rediscovering mathematics and the great Greek texts. Italy's Renaissance princes kept scholars as show-off status symbols ("The scholars cost more than a dog, but not always more than a horse"). It was intellectually absurd, feels Menen, to call on Italy for a burst of Renaissance creativity after World War II. However, "the Italians, who are an obliging people, did their best and produced an original line in beach pants for women...
...make the choices himself--that should be left to the politicians--for he may ignore the social and political implications of his decision. There is nothing new about any of this, but Black puts it in a simple, exemplary fashion that makes the cant of the campaign seem properly absurd. "The mere fact that a river runs down-hill very fast," he says, "is not sufficient reason to build a power...
Whatever the measure of applause, Khrushchev's speech struck Western delegates-and even many Africans-as third-rate propaganda spiced with "absurd" proposals, not the least of which was the suggestion that the emerging African nations, which owed so much to the U.N., should oust Hammarskjold...
Hollow Laughter. In The Night of Time, Author Fü;p-Miller, an encyclopedic, Hungarian-born historian who teaches sociology at Manhattan's Hunter College, produced a soberly symbolic essay on the fatuity of war. Wider in scope, The Silver Bacchanal reveals man as an Absurd Animal, torn between hope and despair, ideal love and an insatiable lust. Fü;p-Miller's instrument of dissection is irony, e.g., the army's bureaucratic campaign against disease-carrying houseflies, in which the city is divided into sectors manned by bumbling brigades of swatters. But the laughter...
...vengeful, peeking, bumbling fellow who botched his job so badly that he created man imperfect, then cursed the whole race of man for the same imperfection, and could find no better way out of the dilemma than to allow his "son" to die a tortured death even more absurd...