Word: despairingly
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...popular of contemporary historians, Brinton was also one of the most perceptive. In The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), a study of four major upheavals, from the English rebellion of 1640 to the Russian Revolution of 1917, he spelled out his now-familiar theory that revolutions stem from hope not despair, from the promises of progress rather than from continuous oppression...
...passed as drafted. He then set to work hammering out an acceptable substitute, which he later guided to passage with a combination of eloquence and parliamentary skill. "The pages of history are full of the tales of those who sought the promise of the city and found only despair," he told the Senate. "From the Book of Job to Charles Dickens to James Baldwin, we have read the ills of the cities. Our cities contain within themselves the flowers of man's genius and the nettles of his failures." Robert Kennedy called it "the best speech I ever heard...
...tanks guarded the field, and Soviet secret police whisked him and his fellow reformist leaders in official Soviet autos to a temporary government headquarters in Hradčany Castle. Dubček's forehead was marked by a deep cut. His face was haggard with fatigue and despair. On arrival at the castle, he collapsed in a faint...
...Even his childhood memories as the son of a Rumanian couple living in France are rendered as scattered images rather than timebound incidents. Chronology, he implies, is untrustworthy; it has a way of running out. There is comfort in his childhood impressions, but they are inadequate protection against the despair that swamps him now at 55. His uneasiness spills forth in tuneless lamentations...
...turned his malaise into an esthetic principle. "Pain, grief, failure, have always seemed to me truer than success or pleasure," he says. It is this principle that leads him to so much disjointed and self-pitying maundering. As a devout solipsist, he feels that the answer to his despair must come from within himself. As an obsessed truth seeker, however, he will be satisfied with nothing less than some externally produced revelation. Alcohol and Martin Buber's transcendant optimism provide only temporary relief...