Word: despairingly
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Sylvia took all of life with terrifying seriousness; the words "never again" came only too quickly to her. She was capable of emotional fixity that makes the poems written just before her suicide in 1963 nearly unbearable: pictures of rage and despair drawn virtually in words of one syllable. Her novel The Bell Jar, while written in quasi-Salinger style, is a remorseless account of adolescent breakdown...
...course dated--peace marches and draft-dodging seem historical curiosities, almost archaicisms, by now. The play's chief impact, however, was never political; it derived instead from the emotional interaction between its characters, whose apparent friendship yields eventually to a sense of isolation and despair. Unfortunately, the Dunster House Drama Society's production of Moonchildren never fully creates the illusion of an initial community of friends, so the dissolution of that community is less heart-rending than it should be. Nevertheless, this production is enlivened by a few very funny moments, and standout performances by Diane Sherlock as a bizarre...
This new musical language is marvelous for the expression of horror, desolation, despair, and other standard 20th-century emotions. It is less appropriate for pastoral scenes or nostalgic longing. For the expression of these states, a more conservative, traditional idiom is needed, and Aaron Copland, whose Appalachian Spring was the second work of the concert, is one of the century's great conservatives. Appalachian Spring uses an intentionally accesible idiom which relies on triads and simple melodies mostly drawn from folk-songs to evoke a "pioneer celebration of Spring...
Success, which William James called "the bitch goddess," has exerted a tripolar magnetic pull on most Americans. It is variously regarded with desire, fear and despair. The desire is to succeed. The fear is of failing to succeed. The despair is the feeling of emptiness, the loss of a rooted and perhaps better self after one has succeeded. The most distressing knowledge of all, of course, is to realize that you sought esteem in the eyes of others because you lacked it in your...
Occasionally Powers' exasperation and despair overcome him and his control slips. Then he is apt to plant heavy symbols: worms, lilies, a dead dove. But for the rest, he remains the creator of a small miracle: the only man besides John Updike who can write about salvation and damnation in a world rapidly becoming trivialized by loneliness and loss of ardor, a world with an end but no amen...