Word: worldly
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Havel insists he will serve only until elections for a new Parliament are held, probably in June. Like the political figure he is increasingly compared to, Poland's Lech Walesa, he seems to prefer being kingmaker to being king. But in the brave new world of Eastern Europe, all axioms have been reduced to theorems and all vows rendered interim. Many Czechs think Havel will seek a more permanent role in politics, a pursuit he seems to love -- at least for this heady period of symbolizing freedom and basking in praise, before the hard task of transition sets...
...that is enough to satisfy the state. In Temptation, Havel retells the Faust myth in terms of the ego-driven distortions of truth committed by his compatriots. In the essay The Power of the Powerless, he lambastes an archetypal grocer who places a poster saying WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE in his shopwindow to prove himself orthodox and ensure his comfort. Dissecting the web of hypocrisies and self-deceptions that formed the social fabric of communist life, Havel argues for "living within the truth." He writes, "You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take...
...Wilde's most memorable stories was a 1983 cover on the death penalty. He wrote so gripping an account of what it felt like to sit in an electric chair that the first paragraph of his story was printed on the cover itself. Occasionally, his travels around the world have proved to be somewhat disorienting: when he was covering a kidnaping in California in 1976, a rental agency refused to provide a car for him since he was carrying only a driver's license from Zaire...
...Godot wait for a savior who never comes, or heard the old man in Krapp's Last Tape review recorded fragments of his life as he murmurs, over and over, "Spool," or shared the haplessness of the elderly couple in Endgame as they face the end of the world while encased in trash cans. Beyond his own art, Beckett shaped the vision of countless others. They emulated, if never equaled, his simplicity of means, philosophical daring and ability to engage vast ideas in tiny trickles of closely guarded language. Above all, Beckett's life and work taught others the lesson...
There are many reasons, aside from the personal commitment of Jewish filmmakers, for Hollywood's preoccupation with the Holocaust. It is one act of state terrorism that has been exhaustively detailed. The first images of gas chambers and mass graves in 1945 sickened the world, not just with their charnel power but also with an awareness that the villains were once torchbearers of Western civilization. Hitler upended the cradle that had rocked Beethoven and Goethe, and hell fell out. His murder of millions of people for the crime of being born Jewish is an act worth pondering and mourning...