Word: fatalism
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...doubt Goncourt would have been pleased to find how durable this class of sexual object turned out to be. Pink and proletarian, tousled, complaisant and rather nitwitted, she persisted as the Ideal Mistress (counterpart to the Fatal Woman) well into the 20th century. Her ancestors are the nymphs of Boucher. Her descendant-spoiled by independence, but still embodying the fantasy of the naughty French chambermaid-is Brigitte Bardot...
...almost approaches dereliction of duty" (TIME, Nov. 13). One prosecutor even admitted that he had "reasonable doubt," then took it back. Defense Attorney Hawk, who believes Corona is a victim of ethnic prejudice, took a gamble by not presenting any witnesses at all. That appears to have been a fatal error. "It bothered everybody," said one of the jurors. "You can't judge too well unless both sides are presented...
...note about Medea is that it is an un-Greek tragedy in Aristotelian terms. Though Medea fell in love with Jason through the agency of the goddesses Hera and Aphrodite, the deities are conspicuously absent from the play as instruments of inevitability. The heroine does not fall through a fatal flaw, or die, and the catharsis of pity and terror is largely missing. Medea wreaks havoc on herself and those around her by fulfilling her own nature, that of being a creature of unbridled emotions. To Euripides and his Greek audience, the tragedy was probably regarded as that...
...newborn babies, and his cry was unusually shrill and high-pitched. Within several days after birth, his tormented wails became incessant. His sweating body shook and twitched. Occasionally he vomited. If his condition had gone undiagnosed and untreated, the baby might have suffered a convulsion, which could have been fatal, or have died a slower death by dehydration. But the signs have become all too familiar to inner-city doctors. The child's mother was a narcotics addict, and he was suffering withdrawal from the "habit" forced upon him in the womb...
During the '60s, Cassady caromed naturally from the Beat Generation into the acid culture. He joined Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and was last seen heading into Mexico, where in 1968 he dropped dead next to a railroad track after a spree fueled by a fatal blend of drugs and alcohol. Thus ended Kerouac's final vision: he and his friend Cassady growing old together, living with their families on the same street in some quiet backwater. Very touching, and very American. James Fenimore Cooper fantasies the last Mohicans, Kerouac dreams up Neal Cassady as the last...