Word: bafflement
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...slapstick tragedy is not the only reason why people are watching Mary Hartman. The show's fascination lies in its oddly shifting tone. Almost all of the characters are confused. Mary herself is usually slack-jawed with bafflement-about her sister, who has fallen in with the local massage-parlor king; her grandfather, "the Fernwood Flasher"; and most of all by her stolid and truly enigmatic husband Tom. Though he is having an affair with Mae, a comely co-worker at the plant, he is impotent with Mary. The situation makes him terse and glum...
...Bafflement is surely the least obvious fault of Bashevis Singer's stories. They all resound with a clarity that comes from sparse language and a discerning eye for only the most important details. And through this clarity, a stark precision that has captured the lives of a very small segment of mankind, there comes a kind of broader perspective I can only call wisdom because it seems so rare in the modern short story...
...could it happen?" a stunned South Vietnamese official wondered last week. "I just don't see how it could happen." His bafflement was shared by much of the world after the swift collapse of Saigon's fighting forces with almost no resistance in the face of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. With rare exceptions, the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) did not even stand its ground and fight, dissolving instead into panic and flight in a historic military debacle...
...citizens of invalids. Even certain cancers, notably Hodgkin's disease and leukemia, have shown remarkable remissions under treatment. Infant mortality is less than 19 per thousand, and the contemporary child can expect to live four years longer than his parents. This may be a mixed blessing, considering our bafflement about how to use those bonus years, but it is still impressive that adults today may be expected to enjoy the greatest longevity of any Americans in history...
After 15 minutes of telephoning, the lady guarding the entry let me in. The building had two primary tenants, a silk-exporting agency and a violin factory. Up on the sixth floor I found my old office. The walls were filthy. Had they ever been repainted? To the bafflement of an old man poring over a thick ledger at a desk where mine once was, I vainly searched the walls for a familiar mark or crack. Outside, the lights along the Whangpoo River below were just coming on, but the neon glitter of old Shanghai is gone forever...