Word: despairingly
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...dilemmas of Dick Van Dyke, television gave us a living-room war, assassinations and demonstrations. There was a flood of information without experience, eulogies that briefly inspired, shocks that permanently numbed. A lot of idealism was distilled down to cynicism, and a lot of hope was replaced by despair...
...worse than the despair of the sixties is the indifference and self-deception with which Maynard approaches the seventies. "I had visions of good works," she writes. "Now my goal is simpler. I want to be happy. And I want comfort... I'll vote and I'll give to charity, but I won't give myself. I have a sudden desire to buy land... a kind of fall-out shelter, I guess. As some people prepare for their old age, so I prepare for my twenties. A little house, a comfortable chair, peace and quiet -- retirement sounds tempting...
...baseball ethos lovingly, savoring its madness and its magnetism, he betrays an exasperated affection for it that he may not have felt when he began. He leaves us laughing but wistful, smug but reverent, and with a musty, clinging air of ambivalence about lost American dreams. Perhaps it's despair folded over, cynicism gone hysterical, or a commercial fake, but Smitty takes us on a sympathetic journey...
Scorn. That despair suddenly dissolved when they heard lectures at the College de France by Philosopher Henri Bergson, whose theories of creative evolution exalted the spirit of man and his ability to find basic reality through intuition. Then, in 1905, Jacques and Raïssa, now newlyweds, happened into a life-changing friendship with Novelist Léon Bloy, a wild, irascible spirit and passionate Catholic who preached to his smug culture that faith and social conscience were inseparable. "Money," Bloy once wrote, "is the blood of the poor." Both of the Maritains were baptized as Catholics...
Before he departed, Nixon held one of his rare meetings with the full Cabinet. Perhaps he felt that its members deserved a report or some reassurance from him. The mood, said one participant, was one of "concern bordering on despair." Watergate was clearly the dominant subject of conversation. "We're going to clear it up," Nixon told the Cabinet. Later, almost with an air of "this too shall pass," he said that "things...