Word: absurdity
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...most standards, Simone Weil was an absurd and unattractive woman. Almost constantly ailing, painfully humorless and so intense she was either irritating or ridiculous, she agonized through a short life of 34 years and died in 1943 in a gesture that seemed to typify her gift for futile heroics. She virtually starved herself to death in England by refusing, though she was weak and ill, to eat more than the wartime ration for her native France...
...politics; as a revolutionary fighter she deplored reliance on force. Yet today Simone Weil is looked upon by an increasing audience as one of the outstanding religious figures of her time.* In the current issue of the Jewish monthly, Commentary, is a penetrating study of the "Saint of the Absurd" by Leslie A. Fiedler, associate professor of humanities at the University of Montana...
Modern history has no more dramatic scene than Wu's speech at Lake Success. The world heard only by dim and dignified hearsay of Hitler raging at statesmen who came to Berchtesgaden; it saw only the absurd arrested motion of Hitler's triumphant jig in the Forest of Compiègne. Millions by television and radio saw & heard Wu spew forth Communism's unappeasable hatred, cloaked in Communism's lies and muscled by Communism's paranoid vocabulary of denunciation...
...Simont is poking fun at those strange, histrionic, and sometimes absurd people who live in the world of opera. In his 60 black and white pictures he points up the absurdities of nine French, German, and Italian operas. A proper sense of reverence pervades the entire gallery, however, and the result is that "Opera Souffle" is good-natured, excellent...
Twice in every 1,000 births, some unhappy mother finds that she has borne a child suffering from an affliction which has been misnamed "Mongolian idiocy." In the 85 years since mongolism was defined, authorities have disagreed widely as to its cause. No speculation seemed too absurd. Mongolism, said some, looking at the slanted eyes of its victims, was racial evidence of "the Mongol in our midst." Others, more responsible, argued that it was caused by "advanced maternal age," exhaustion of the womb, ovarian disorders, an upset gland (any gland would do) or, finally, heredity...