Word: despairingly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Strife. In his oratory, Gaddafi often betrays a sort of messianic despair. "The Arabs are engulfed in torpor and darkness," he told his people last year. "The Arabs have lost direction." What he might better have said is that the so-called "Arab nation"-that congeries of 24 republics, monarchies, sheikdoms and otherwise organized anomalies-is, as usual, in a state of fratricidal strife...
...Despair. Small wonder then that Gaddafi romanticizes a return to an Islamic purity of the past, or that his call brings forth such emotion from his audiences. He looks back to the 8th century, when Arab power extended from Persia to southern France, and concludes that the Western governments have used Israel to divide and subvert the Arab nation. This kind of romanticism can lead, however, to a new cycle of despair. As Arnold Hottinger, a Swiss expert on Arab affairs, has written, "Radical discontent with the political situation as it is can lead to a fixation on goals incapable...
...still almost unknown in the U.S. Octavio Paz, Mexico's most distinguished poet and essayist (TIME, Jan. 29), impresses the reader as one of the most provocative thinkers in the West. Gracefully, lucidly, he talks of topics as diverse as the rebellion of modern youth ("an explosion of despair"), the art of Marcel Duchamp, Sade's philosophy ("His model is not a volcano, although he liked volcanoes very much, but cold lava"). Paz even notes the first feminist, Penthesilea, legendary queen of the Amazons, who ruled from "a throne of vertigo and tides...
Hesse has been most rightly accused of not being able to grow as a writer. Throughout these stories the same theme repeats itself: loss of innocence or happiness, and a despair of the present, coupled with yearnings for a dream-like childhood of the past. This is true of the earliest piece, "The Island Dream." Here a young man travels in his dream to a fantasy island, where the women of his past, innocent love live in an idyllic setting. But soon he has to leave, sad and frustrated that he never held onto their love when he could. Again...
...faults on his wife and his mother; the cost of the dessert at his daughter's wedding is more important to him than her marriage itself; and he cares more about his stomach and his clothes than about his wife. After Fabray leaves him he spreads his arms in despair and grimaces with suburban uncertainty (about forty times) wondering why she would rather live with a kindly Greek waiter on the upper West Side than share the fruits of his success in the wholesale lighting fixture business...