Word: abyss
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...hurl himself toward a silent, detached state of unreason. He sees the philosopher's task not as pointing out the truth but rather as showing the way toward freedom through acceptance of futility, the only tenable stance for the conscious man. "After the banality of the abyss, what miracles in being!" Cioran writes. "To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring...
...also a feast of literacy. At his best, John Osborne can make words spit, sing, keen and dance. In this film, he has something to say and knows how to say it. Nicol Williamson does the rest with abrasive splendor; one crease in his troubled brow is an abyss of anguish...
...events of 20th century history have shattered the presumptions of the problem play. Man's ineradicable genius for evil has reduced the doctrine of social engineering to puny tinkering. Playwrights like Beckett, lonesco and Genet have abandoned admonitory Ibsenite finger-waving for a nerve-shattering look into the abyss of existence itself, which in their view is stingingly futile, innately unjust and thoroughly absurd. In the future it may be said that they held a broken mirror up to the nature of the age, but for now they have rendered Miller obsolete by altering the central focus of theater...
...Albright's permanent collection. The room (see overleaf) was plated with mirrors on the walls, floor and ceiling. Looking up, festivalgoers could see themselves, standing on their heads a thousand times; looking down, they could see themselves again, plunging like a jack-in-the-box into the abyss...
...life, instead of mocking all comment on life or death. Orton was a promising young English playwright (Entertaining Mr. Sloane) who was murdered by his friend (Kenneth Halliwell) last August (TIME, Sept. 15). Both his fate and some of his lines suggest that he had looked intimately into the abyss of existence. But Loot is not despairing, and even its shock effects are surprisingly good-natured...