Word: meaninglessness
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...attack that earned him the Wimbledon championship, needed only 72 minutes to dispose of India's Permjit Lall, 6-4, 6-3, 6-0. Ralston and McKinley then won the doubles to give the U.S. a 3-0 lead and turn the last two singles matches into a meaningless exhibition. Final score: U.S. 5, India...
...most philosophical passages prove far less convincing than these. Often Kazantzakis tantalizingly suggests an idea--for instance, he defines God as "Necessity and Coincidence"--without further developing it. Further, some of his philosophy seems almost meaningless. For example, when describing the "Breath," the vital energy of life, he suggests that "Whatever was once a movement or an impulse upward in the forward foregoing generation--whatever was once Spirit--becomes, in the subsequent generation, motionless, stifled, heavy and in time reacts just like substance...
...beings of Betelgeuse's planet, it turns out, were once dominant and as highly developed as man on earth in the 20th century. The master race of apes did not evolve faster than men, but superseded them when men became slothful, numbed by a feeling that life is meaningless. The meaning of Boulle's cheerful parable is not a mocking warning but an observation: human dignity is both precarious and precious; too often it is based on pride in achievements that can be matched by clever mimics of what has been done before. Like the Red Queen, Western...
This willed decision to play the role that life had already forced him into makes him, for Sartre, the perfect existential hero. Indeed, to Sartre, Genet is modern man. Born into a meaningless and hostile world, guilty, fearful, evil and vacillating, man can be free only by willing the existence he has been given and acting energetically on his decision-just as a man carried along by an inexorable current can create the illusion of freedom by swimming with the current but faster than it carries...
...Brigadier General Pham Xuan Chien, onetime director of security services, who was sacked by Nhu when his ambitions began to get out of hand. He now has the virtually meaningless job of assistant chief of staff...