Word: beggarly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Then in 1921, a loinclothed mendicant with long, matted hair and body smeared with ashes turned up in Dacca. Rumor said he was the dead Kumar, and the tenants rushed to hear the beggar's story. Roy (if it was the Kumar) said the brother-in-law had poisoned him in Darjeeling. As he lay, unconscious but not dead, on his funeral pyre, a great rain had revived...
...Oedipus himself-to Oedipus who, foredoomed to commit atrocious crimes, has despite all precautions unknowingly murdered his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta. When the last nail of proof is driven solidly home, Oedipus, in an agony of guilt and horror, blinds himself and goes forth, a beggar, to roam the world...
...early Greeks death was simply an unavoidable calamity. The dead Achilles warned Odysseus that it was better to be a beggar on earth than a king in Hades. Later their philosophers tried to reason with death and strike a bargain they could make the best of: "There is either annihilation or immortality," said Socrates. "Either is well...
...ironic inhumanity of all this is that there is still food in Hunan. Scores of beggar children wander with chopsticks and empty rice bowls through Hengyang or lie exhausted in the gutters, but the city's restaurants still serve ten-course feasts for those who can pay. We ate such a meal one night as guests of the local newspapermen, whose slightly fantastic prelude to the banquet was the presentation of carefully wrapped samples of the clay, weeds, rice husks and grass on which people were starving not far from our table...
...Stop right there. Who said anything about reasonable? Give the waiter 20%, the captain a dollar or two dollars, the hatcheck girl 25 or 50?, the powder-room attendant a quarter, the doorman a quarter and the beggar in front of the door a quarter-then switch with the beggar...