Word: adrift
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...narrator: "I could not resist a vague intellectual empathy toward the man who was now an abstraction - who had triumphantly nullified himself; who had attained the apex of an axiom." Similarly, in the title story, a "reliable, law-abiding, practical man" suddenly sloughs all his responsibilities to live adrift on a river in an open boat. There, fading from the reader's view, he seeks the spiritual dimension: the third bank of the river...
Leave he does, for an assignment in Hollywood, only to find his Salzburg companions arriving daily-adrift, usually broke, looking for movie money. Behrman's glimpse of Hollywood will not trouble the ghosts of novelists Evelyn Waugh and Nathanael West, but he does focus on something these satirists missed. Behrman's Hollywood is like a latter-day Paris or Geneva-an asylum for talented refugees who in fact fled to the area in the late...
Connie was beautiful. She smiled when she sang in her clear, almost old fashioned style. The lead was playing cool, yellow shades, and long locks adrift in the wind, he would simply shrug his shoulders when he got bored with a rip and with a graceful change of gears slip into something...
Then came Kramer, Judgment at Nuremberg, still the most polished of his creations, cast Tracy as a New England judge set adrift in the land of war criminals and called on to apply his raw honesty to the ambiguities of complicit guilt and collective responsibility. Tracy exuded New Englandisms and was honest as a rock; but he could carry it no further, because Kramer's picture never achieved even the subtlety of a good Playhouse 90 (Judgment at Nuremberg), incidentally, like Ship of Fools, improves measurably when shown on the home screen). Worse...
Jaspers sees Germany today as morally adrift in prosperity, pretty much as it was morally adrift in poverty in 1931, when he warned of the approaching collapse of the Weimar Republic in Man in the Modern Age. Does he now foresee a neo-Nazi takeover? Hardly. But he does assert that the Germans are still making the same kind of peculiarly German mistake: looking for a system so perfect that the individual citizen will be spared the effort of trying to be good...