Word: purposeless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...include much exchange for the artists who perform abroad. They are expected both to win their hosts' hosannas and return with the same dim view of the outside world as they had when they left. The formula: though Americans can be nice enough personally, their culture is starved, purposeless, oppressed, and altogether appalling...
Blowing incessantly, desiccating the town and the vineyards, pausing only to howl at a higher pitch, is a "furious monotonous purposeless wind"-hence the book's title. It is the breath of a malevolent universe and carries the inevitability of human defeat...
...Simon's poeticizing betrays him. His final gust tastes too much of sorrow spooned with a sophomore's relish: "Soon [the wind] would blow up great storms across the plain, tear the last red leaves from the vines, strip the trees bent beneath it, its strength unimpeded, purposeless, doomed to exhaust itself endlessly, without hope of an end, wailing its long nightly complaint as if it were sorry for itself, envying the sleeping men, transitory and perishable creatures, envying them their possibility of forgetfulness, of peace: the privilege of dying...
...passed at the height of the McCarthy scare when educators were too timid to protest such obnoxious provisions. The 86th Congress, which is scheduled to consider new educational aid legislation anyway, would do well to remove loyalty restrictions from both bills. Rather than aids to education, loyalty oaths are purposeless and dangerous hindrances to the spirit of the legislation containing them...
Both Farquhar and Lowe show they write because they have nothing better to do--it's not idle. Farquhar's "The Stage of the Year" stumbles over words sometimes, but his dialogue is terse, his frenzied story about the purposeless destruction of a dog very real. Lowe's strength depends more on what he knows about people and customs in Jamaica, whom and which he treats softly and without awe in a swift telling. Heliczer's piece proves that irreverence and irrelevance sometime mean the same thing, and is in his usual adroit good humor...