Word: tranquillity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...deep past -- his bourgeois childhood as the son of a stern Lutheran minister and dutifully repressed mother -- or his adult past, where wives, mistresses and children drift almost anonymously through the shadows of his theaters and sound stages, Bergman rarely strikes the customary autobiographical notes of nostalgia and the tranquil acceptance of fate. To him, middle-class morality is a cloak for madness, family life an invitation to distraction and guilt. Neither helps one come to grips with decay, eroticism, violence -- those irrational torments by which the unseen world insists on its presence in our lives...
...were made to prolong life. There was no operating theater; no temperatures were taken or pulses recorded. Instead of specialists mumbling into charts, there were doctors sitting at bedsides holding patients' trembling hands. When death came, it was not with the accompaniment of IV drips and respirators but with tranquil normality. Above all, through the skillful and unobtrusive administering of drugs, there was control of the agonizing pain that is often bound to terminal cancer. "What I did," says Dame Cicely, "was to allow patients to speak for themselves, to suggest what we ought to do to give them safe...
Suddenly, the traditionally stormy budget process in Congress had become an unusually mild and tranquil one. The House and Senate passed budget resolutions that differed only slightly from the administration's requests...
What few are likely to find amusing is Rambo III's story line. For a novelty, the superhero this time is discovered not aroil but tranquil, living in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. Sure, he occasionally indulges in the local sport of stick fighting to keep in trim, but mostly he enjoys the silence and the sunsets. When his mentor and only friend, Colonel Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna), is captured by a particularly disagreeable Soviet officer while trying to aid the Afghan rebels, Rambo is recalled to primitive business as usual. There are, of course, low cunning, high explosives...
...such manifestations as rock 'n' roll, through which First Cousin and Childhood Chum Jerry Lee Lewis had won fame. Pornography, another pet target, constituted a form of "addiction," he proclaimed. Those who sell it "represent the worst our great nation has to offer, the scum on an otherwise tranquil pond...