Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...area of silence which Kafka sought to decode, and which he succeeded at least in marvelously dramatizing, was that bleak void in which man, like a rat in a laboratory maze, strives frantically (and often ludicrously) to approach God, while God (with the detachment of the scientific mind) observes the data of the frenzy and the fun. Milton, in his blindness, sought "to justify the ways of God to men." The sum of Kafka's report was that the ways of God and man are irreconcilable...
Kafka has been called a gloomy writer, a follower of bleak Danish Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. He was, in fact, one of the rarest types in literature-a religious humorist...
...trapezoidal dining room with its glittering candlebra and bleak yellow walls doesn't supply as much inward contentment as what comes off the serving line. When all is said and done, Leverett probably stands first gastronomically among the five Houses connected with the mass-production line of the University kitchen...
...civilization, says Toynbee, is in its time of troubles (he dates them from the wars of the Reformation), perhaps toward the end of them. He finds bleak comfort in the thought that as yet no universal state has been imposed despite Napoleon's attempt, and two attempts by the Germans. But from the vast design and complex achievement of A Study of History one hopeful meaning stands out: not materialist but psychic factors are the decisive forces of history. The action takes place within the amphitheater of the world and the flux of time; the real drama unfolds within...
...Many of the students go into the country on weekends and work for farmers in order to get food-why, we were living on beans and peas," Miss Von Lieben smiled. Her description of university life in modern Vienna was a bleak...