Word: bleake
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Punch Out a Meaning. At 48, Simone de Beauvoir is a handsome woman. She has never married, and her years-long liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has brought to birth only a bleak philosophy which says that it is up to each man or woman to punch out a meaning to life in a meaningless world that none ever sought. A not uncommon game among Paris intellectuals consists in trying to answer the question: How did Simone get that way? Her Parisian parents were Roman Catholics, her father a bookish lawyer, her mother a reserved middle-class lady. Simone...
...hope you will permit me to dispel some of the anxiety caused by your recent editorial about the Department of English, for I can't believe that our prospects are as bleak as you say. To be sure, Professor Rollins' retirement is a major loss for the Department as well as for the University and the profession, but otherwise the situation is reasonably well in hand. We have been fortunate in securing the services of four distinguished persons as visiting lecturers: Miss Rosemond Tuve of Connecticut College, Mr. Northrup Frye of Toronto, Mr. F. W. Dupee of Columbia...
...richly lugubrious style. To the jukebox generation the words were all but meaningless. Yet, as late as the 1920s, the ballad's bitter plaint was a real-life refrain to millions of U.S. workers from Georgia's green-roofed cotton villages to Oregon's bleak lumber settlements. Those workers had lived, like Composer Merle Travis' coalminer father, in company towns-drab, depressed communities where the worker traded at a company store,* rented a company house, was watched by company cops. Today company towns are still flourishing in the U.S. But the towns, and the tune, have...
Last week this bleak land was the pivot and focus for all the tensions of the Middle East. Its 500,000 Arab refugees were the area's most corrosive concentration of hatred for Israel. Its Arab Legion was the Middle East's finest force, whose allegiance could sharply tilt the whole area's precarious balance. Egypt wooed it and played venomously on the bitterness of its refugees. The British, swallowing their pride, strove to maintain their slipping hold on this onetime docile ward...
...years ago Danilo Dolci decided to give up studying architecture and do something practical about the poor in Italy. He went back to Sicily's bleak, bandit-ridden "Triangle of Hunger," where he had lived as a boy. There, in the fishing village of Trappeto, with his own meager savings and a few small contributions from outside, he put up a collection of shacks and shanties which he called "the Hamlet of God" to provide shelter for the area's neediest cases. He married an impoverished widow with five children; together they adopted five more childen...