Word: despairingly
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...heroic acts possible in the world. Suicide is the last act to make life comprehensible. It is purified of self-contempt and vain resignation by the capture, through the suffering of shame, of that internal fire which burns the will clear. It is exonerated from the deeper vanity of despair, or storic contemptus mundi, by the perfect fusion of hand and heart. Decretas dispels all ambiguity...
...same time, you will have dumped into the American community life young black veterans from Vietnam who have reached a very high point of bitterness and despair and who, having suffered for what they felt were dubious reasons, now are going to be impatient and refuse to accept injustice. They are coming back with skills in warfare, with a new confidence and with no feelings of inferiority...
...life and is probably right. He hates to be contradicted by Yevgheniy, a doctor (the only one who likes Konstantin's play), when he says he is miserable. Nina wants to marry the famous writer. The old man, Sorin, has unconscious spells, and the young man has spells of despair. One has a little wisdom but is infirm; the other has enormous energy, which is wasted by the riot of his fancies. The country state where everyone is vacationing is dreadfully mismanaged. When Nina's infatuation with Trigorin issues in a child, and when Konstantin's symbolic seagull becomes...
...deception. His realism, then, does not say "All men are like this; therefore, take note and beware"; but rather, "All men are like this, mysterious and deluded; as you cannot understand, so you cannot judge by laughter; but remember that it is a comedy; if you start lamenting about despair, you become part of the comedy...
...DOES Chekhov give us that is positive? Of course, he hardly owes us anything positive. But I think that, like Johnson, he places great value on getting the mind off the mind through work. Johnson used to quote Burton, "Be not idle, be not solitary," and write to himself, "Despair is a sin." But once religious comfort, however rational, gives place to "the work ethic," the solution takes on the appearance of romantic oversimplification. Work, like everything else-socialism, democracy, love-was to Chekhov only a preconceived notion which could not renew life by itself, and which, if clung...