Word: meaningless
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...great detail the mental processes and the doings of some of the unloveliest people ever seen outside the caricatures of George Grosz. The first of the three books is The Romantic, laid in 1888, and picturing the world of potbellied landowners and their sensitive sons, a world of meaningless propriety, duels, love affairs with actresses; a world so hedged about with tradition that it is a scandal when a young officer leaves the army to manage the family estate. It is the other side of German romanticism-Unter den Linden with the leaves off the trees; champagne parties with...
Does he think Treasure is his best work to date? The question is virtually meaningless to him. He says, drily and without self-consciousness: "It is as a picturemaker would have...
...help itself. Looking at the export-import gap, no trader could soundly think that this was going to be an easy job. In 1947, the U.S. had made a tiny down payment on the job of reviving world trade. It had agreed to cut tariffs. Tariff cutting was meaningless unless other nations were able to make the goods to sell the U.S. And 1947 had shown that the gap between what they received and what they shipped was too big to cross without a new kind of bridge. Thus, to the small down payment at Geneva, most enlightened businessmen voted...
...John Wheelwright's granite-honest poems of moral and spiritual struggle; William Carlos Williams' angular free verse written between his rounds as a New Jersey physician. For most of Spearhead's contributors, however, experimentalism has become an end in itself, a sort of perpetual and meaningless joy ride...
Naturally enough for a novel of these times, the theme is the problem of freedom. Mathieu, a poor professor, has spent his whole life shaking off human responsibilities in a desire to be free, but he has only succeeded in making his life meaningless. Through the three-day span of the story, he sees many people, all of whom try to establish contact with him, and draw him into their society, to give his life a purpose. But though Mathieu would like to take the plunge, he is not convinced of the rightness of being a bourgeois or a communist...