Word: despairingly
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Kafka in 1920 is already living under the shadow of the tuberculosis which is to kill him four years later. He is a man, he tells Janouch, in rebellion against himself, caught in the "I", "a cage from the past." Visited by the "ever-recurrent sin of despair," he sees the disintegration of individual and society all around him. In his own double life at his writing and at the office he illustrates the modern dichotomy between what Heidegger called the "I", the real self, and the "one", the anonymous, social self, the role. Trained as a lawyer, Kafka speaks...
When Erich Maria Remarque died a year and a half ago at the age of 72, one thought of old films rather than old books. Lush Dmitri Tiomkin sound tracks seemed to leap from the obituaries to strike Remarque's patented theme: grand passion, grand despair in wartime. In one's stereophonic memory chambers, violins throbbed counterpoint to far-off guns and the crumpled-velvet whispers of thwarted lovers. It is as if Remarque's art were defined by one of those overstylized love scenes in Arch of Triumph between Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman...
Mahalia Jackson never sang the blues. "Blues are the songs of despair," she liked to say. "Gospel songs are the songs of hope. When you sing gospel you have the feeling there is a cure for what's wrong." Mahalia had the gift of making her audiences feel there was a cure too. She began her performance with a Bible reading ("to give me inner strength"), then just seemed to brim over with music. Shaking her head till the combs flew out of her hair, whacking her hands together or stretching her arms ecstatically over her head, she raised...
...your Crimson the next four mornings, don't blame the delivery boy. We're taking a vacation just like the rest of you. Don't despair though; we'll be back on Monday, bright and early...
Whatever road Brazil eventually takes, it will probably be a disaster for the remaining Indians. The Amazon will be further penetrated for its wealth, resulting in the callous elimination of more tribal peoples. It is a familiar story, especially to North Americans, who had the despair of their dead Indians raised to a grand passion in last year's bestseller Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Bodard's brutal epic does even more. It gives North Americans a rerun of their own haunted past as seen through Brazil's uneasy present...