Word: despairing
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...bottle and the bed again? This is the basic situation, and it is weak, in that the audience knows that she will, or there would be no play. Evy's two closest friends want to be loyal watchdogs, but their own shaky personalities make them abettors of despair. One is a middle-aged homosexual actor (Michael Lombard) who knows he will never make the grade in the theater. The other is a self-pampering narcissist (Betsy von Furstenberg), whose mentality is simply a cosmetic extension of her face. With inexplicable love and concern, Evy's teen-age daughter...
...there any way that an advanced industrial society can keep from constantly ricocheting between the perils of inflation and unemployment? Some scholars think not, at least not without the most draconian action. John Kenneth Galbraith has become the voice of despair. He insists that, given the power of unions and companies to keep a wage-price spiral going even in a dragging economy, inflation can be curbed only by clamping on permanent wage-price controls...
...like some kind of addiction. I couldn't help myself: I would see some new absurdity-now from the Spartans, now from the Helots-and an impression would come, and the clowning despair would rush over me, the total indifference to anything but the monstrous foolishness of human beings, and in a flash-or a giggle-I was at them. As my idiocy became familiar, it became safe. Children began to mock my eccentricities, or follow after me, mimicking my hobble. At last I had taught them something...
Their confessions wrench us not only because they are so personal, but also because in their amorphousness is a despair we can all feel, not as women or men, but as human beings. And surely, this is Joyce Carol Oates' only real concern, evoking this kind of understanding, raising this kind of human consciousness. And her Wheel of Love then is also a wheel of lies, of lust, of loss, of life...
Mishima was an impassioned romantic whose real despair at his country's course commingled like sacrificial blood with his own deep need to return to an earlier and, in his view, much nobler Japan. Many critics in Japan felt that he passed the peak of his career as a writer-Sun and Steel, an autobiographical and philosophical book published this year, was not very favorably received-and that he feared reaching old age in obscurity. Said Critic Yamamoto: "He was already 45. After 50, he couldn't have achieved such beauty in his manner of death...