Word: reader
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...grimly concludes, that gift of fire may burn up the world. For the sake of the race Prometheus must go. To be replaced by whom? Atlas, Heilbroner proposes, the burden bearer rather than the problem solver: the man who plays life not to win but to survive. Before a reader is carried away by this bleak neomythology, he should ask: Just what are Heilbroner's deep apprehensions based upon? A few data (mostly projected) and a lot of intuition. Futurology, as Heilbroner is the first to admit, is a game that takes place in its own outer space...
What Heilbroner may express most clearly in this essay is the present fatigued mood of a generation of intellectuals who began, like good Americans, by believing that they had nearly all the answers and have come to despair that they have any. In the absence of proof, a reader can only hope that Heilbroner and his fellow sentries, as he calls them, are now as wrong about sighting the end-of-practically-everything as they were in their youth when, with Marxist or "managerial" revolutions in their heads, a lot of them thought they saw quite another kind Of future...
...young gas meter reader. I call him Conrad Swibel. He says, "Oh, you gotta fight those dogs off. But every once in a while, say in the summer time, in a suburb out there, these young housewives, they're sunning themselves, you know? And she's in a bikini, you know, and her back is to the sun, lying on her stomach, and the bra is loose. And I go up close and I say, 'GAS METER READER!' She turns around, and I see a lot, you know. She says, 'Why didn't you announce yourself?!' And I say, 'Well...
Tragedy hits WWD? Hardly. A WWD reader with a memory for the morbid will doubtless recall that a Paris story last November was written by Marie-Antoinette Esterhazy. She too met an untimely end: "Marie-Antoinette caught cold and died last night," WWD announced...
Despite the repetitions, the discursiveness, the sometimes labored irony, Švejk/Hašek speaks vividly to a new generation that is disillusioned with power, glory and war. The reader gets the feeling that he can begin anywhere in the book, stop anywhere, and still get the essence of it. For the essence is Švejk, and Švejk travels well...