Word: absurdity
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...terror, what values did we have that could comfort us and which we could oppose to his negation? None. What was happening was coming from man himself. We could not deny it. We saw it confirmed every day . . . The world in which we had to live was an absurd world, and there was nothing else, no space in which we could take refuge...
...boulevards, the fashionable word became Sartre's "existentialism." There were no values, man merely "existed," alone in a world where God was dead. The better man knew himself the worse he turned out to be. All he could do was to "free" himself from the absurd world by accepting the worst and going on. To them, "the revolutionary act" was the "free act par excellence," and the existentialists debated endlessly whether they should support the Communist Party. "Should I betray the proletariat to serve truth or betray truth in the name of the proletariat?" worried Sartre...
...Crazy, Absurd Activity. For years, Giacometti destroyed his work as fast as he produced it, but by war's end he began saving and showing the gangling figures and groups, which seem to some eyes to float in a mysterious time and space of their own. An intense, modest man in frayed cuffs and baggy pants, Giacometti has not let success dull his adventurous dissatisfaction...
...most recent men and women are gaining in weight. "They eat too much," he jokes. He is experimenting also in drawing and painting. Where it will lead, Alberto Giacometti does not know. "Art is not a science," says he. "It is a crazy thing, an absurd activity . . . If I had been able to resolve the problem, I would have ceased to work...
Applicants to the University have often questioned this reputation; their assurance of its exaggeration is echoed by those already here, and most of those who have been here in the past. For it becomes a little absurd when vague charges are balanced, for example, against the record of 174 Harvard men who are president or directors of the country's hundred largest industrial corporations, the University's eight Nobel prize winners, four senators, twenty-five congressmen, and three governors, to mention only the most prominent. It is then indeed difficult to believe in the 'red' reputation of a university which...