Word: absurdity
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...sidewalk existentialists said that, since nothing really mattered very much, everything mattered. Since life was too utterly futile, everybody ought to live it to the hilt. "It is absurd for us to be born," proclaimed existentialism's protector, Jean-Paul Sartre. "It is absurd for us to die." For Parisian intellectuals, desperately in quest of an interesting pose, this was the ticket...
...millions in the Western world, who react with uneasiness and doubt to the U.S. atom bomb and U.S. emphasis on material success, she is a symbol of hope, sanity and human dignity. Her earnest idealism, which many of her own countrymen sometimes find a little absurd, is eminently reassuring to great masses of people who are exposed to Communist cries of American warmongering. So is her habit of attacking complex problems in hopeful, homely terms. She is received abroad as a sort of senior "First Lady" of the U.S. At home, the Gallup poll for the past four years...
...want one of the most crucial jobs in the Western world? At this absurd point, Winston Churchill stepped in: he proffered his own closest wartime comrade and personal friend, 64-year-old General Lord Ismay...
Even though it is patently absurd to try to legislate freedom of press in a world that, at best, is half slave and half free, the United Nations has been trying to do just that for four years. Twice, U.N. press committees have come a cropper; their proposals would shackle the press rather than free it (TIME, March 10). Last week a third U.N. subcommission passed still another bootless plan. This time it was an "international code of ethics" for the press, drafted by a group of newsmen from all over the world-including the Russians. Sample provisions: "[Newsmen] should...
...some absurd hour in the early morning, she is awakened. The technique used for this cruel intrusion will vary. It may be a thermometer inserted in her mouth, a pitcher of ice water placed on her table, or orders to get washed and readied for a breakfast which commonly arrives an hour or two later. Any attempt to snatch a brief rest during the remainder of the day is likely to end in disappointment due to the parade of the VIPs, who so space their visits that there is never an idle moment: the baby, the nurse, the nurse...