Word: meaninglessness
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...seem like a poet-painter's vision of mankind in limbo. Only by literary license can The Last Squadron be called a novel. Using the pointillist method of French Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat, Author Gaiser puts his characters on paper like isolated dots, makes their destinies random and meaningless until the reader can draw back and view them against the broad canvas of total war. The last squadron, a fighter outfit, is stationed at Janneby West, somewhere on the Western front, and its only task is the increasingly hopeless one of stemming the Allied tide of bombers and fighters...
Even those who had reason to know the truth about Stalin's reign were nevertheless startled by Khrushchev's brutally direct account of such monstrous crimes as the deportation of millions of people from their homelands, the futile and meaningless killing of thousands of party intellectuals, and the hideous miasma of murder and mayhem around the Kremlin. So harrowing was Khrushchev's tale that the U.S. State Department (which had got the text from an undivulged source) debated on the value of releasing it, thinking that many readers might be moved to accept Khrushchev's picture...
...Simone de Beauvoir is a handsome woman. She has never married, and her years-long liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has brought to birth only a bleak philosophy which says that it is up to each man or woman to punch out a meaning to life in a meaningless world that none ever sought. A not uncommon game among Paris intellectuals consists in trying to answer the question: How did Simone get that way? Her Parisian parents were Roman Catholics, her father a bookish lawyer, her mother a reserved middle-class lady. Simone and her younger sister...
...broken affair, but because she has that old existentialist idea that life is empty. It is just here, in the very last paragraph of The Mandarins, that Priestess de Beauvoir chooses to suggest that existentialism is not simply a philosophy of pessimism. Just because life is essentially meaningless, she seems to say, it does not follow that each man and woman must live without developing his or her own meaning. But that meaning must connect the individual to the events of his time and to other people. Man, says Simone, is free, but his freedom to choose will surely lead...
...Alley folk song about a coal miner who is soul-deep in debt to his employer. The song landed with a sixteen-ton impact because of its tootling orchestration and Tennessee Ernie Ford's richly lugubrious style. To the jukebox generation the words were all but meaningless. Yet, as late as the 1920s, the ballad's bitter plaint was a real-life refrain to millions of U.S. workers from Georgia's green-roofed cotton villages to Oregon's bleak lumber settlements. Those workers had lived, like Composer Merle Travis' coalminer father, in company towns-drab...