Word: mereness
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Between people and themselves, separations have always existed. Some of that today is due to the "Is this all there is"-ness of flush modern life; some, to the number of work hours--a mere three hours less a week than in 1970. And the pressures of competition make those hours feel like more. Maybe we are deliberately working harder so as to have less contact, less time for self-inspection. (These are self-interested but not introspective times.) I won't pretend to know what all this means, but if you have preserved Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times...
...Democratic nomination for Governor of New York, he understood that victory would bring an end to his daily therapy, that he would never walk under his own power again. For the remainder of his life--through four years as Governor of New York and 12 years as President--the mere act of standing up with his heavy metal braces locked in place would be an ordeal. Yet the paralysis that crippled his body expanded his mind and his sensibilities. After what his wife Eleanor called his trial by fire, he seemed less arrogant, less superficial, more focused, more complex, more...
...results were epoch making. In both the New World and the Old World, within a mere 5,000 years of the inception of farming, there were dazzling technological advances, including monumental temples, big dams and, above all, a whole new information technology: writing...
...proposed, seemed sometimes to wallow in, what appeared to be--often joyously, often grimly was--chaos. "Things fall apart," Yeats wrote in The Second Coming (in 1921, of course), "the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." It was the century's earliest epitaph, and is still perhaps its most powerful one. And Yeats had yet to conjure with the metaphors of modern science--the theory of relativity; the uncertainty principle; the looming figure of Freud, pseudo-scientific poet of our subjectivity--let alone with Fascism and Stalinism. Or, possibly most addling to a poet, the rise...
...much the fault of professors, who make a living by taking ideas seriously. It seems that in a noble attempt to inspire students to share their scholarly excitement, they have crushed great learning into mediocre bits, lest students choke on it. They have reduced great revelation to mere relevance. In the process, the great thinkers who might otherwise inspire men and women to greatness, become cold marble busts sitting mute while scores graduate without their sage teachings...