Word: darkness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Born on a disputed date in spring 1906, Beckett claimed to remember being a fetus in the womb, a place he recalled not as a haven but as a dark ocean of agony. The son of a surveyor and a nurse, he had a conventional Dublin Protestant upbringing, studied classics in high school and romance languages at Trinity College. At 21 he went to Paris and fell in with literary expatriates including James Joyce, who became a friend and an inspiration -- although, as Beckett noted, Joyce tended toward omniscience and omnipresence in his narrative voice, "whereas I work with impotence...
...walked along a Paris street, a panhandler stabbed him in the chest, perforating a lung and narrowly missing his heart. When Beckett later asked why the attack happened, the assailant replied, "I don't know, sir." That glimpse of the random perils of existence may have confirmed Beckett's dark vision but did not initiate it. His novel Murphy, published the same year, depicts a destitute Irishman, living in London, who daydreams away his days in a rocking chair until a gas plant explodes and shreds him. At his instruction, his ashes are flushed down the toilet of Dublin...
...here is a maxim worth remembering: good motives do not always make good movies. Too often Hollywood finds in the Holocaust a familiar, convenient parable of sanctified martyrdom and slavering sadism. Thorny issues are begged, compelling stories avoided. The dark psychology of the death-camp administrator, himself captive in a twisted chain of command, is rarely investigated. Neither is the prisoner's natural impulse to survive at any cost, which gave rise to "the Jewish members of the GPU, the Capos, the thieves, speculators, informers," as Singer describes them in Enemies, a Love Story. Instead, characters are as reductive...
...dark and stormy night. A door slammed. The maid screamed. A pirate ship appeared on the horizon...
...array of new strategic nuclear weapons -- the MX and Midgetman intercontinental missiles, the B-1 and B-2 (Stealth) bombers and the Trident II submarine-launched missile. These programs are monuments to old thinking. They are throwbacks to the days when the strategists accepted, as an article of their dark faith, the vulnerability of the U.S. to Kremlin crapshooters...