Word: bleak
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...goodwill. At Crossroads, a wretched, ten-year-old squatters' camp outside Cape Town, where 18 blacks were killed by the police last February, authorities helped the first of up to 12,000 black residents make a voluntary move to a nearby government housing area called Khayelitsha. There, in otherwise bleak surroundings, the new settlers are finding such unfamiliar amenities as outhouses, water taps and access to schools, clinics and a community center. They also are being given 18-month residency permits, which allow them to seek employment in the area. Such concessions, however, are being countered by continuing bloodshed...
Then came the bleak surprise. At 3:35 the President's personal aide, Jim Kuhn, phoned White House Chief of Staff Regan from an office near the recovery room. Regan groaned inwardly. Two other doctors took turns at the phone, while Nancy Reagan at the hospital listened on an extension. They discussed what would have to be done if the major surgery were delayed. Reagan would have to go on a preparatory regime again: restricted diet, enemas. Nancy, who seemed upset, interrupted to say, "Let's let the President make the decision," and hurried down the hall to the recovery...
...showed me that literature could be fabricated out of the material of common life--in my case, common Chicago life. Bellow's work, from first to last, is the biography of a place, a map of his own consciousness as it evolves against the backdrop of the bleak industrial city, with its stockyards and sooty cast-iron buildings, shrouded in a midday gloom...
This is not necessarily as bleak a scenario, however, as the surface indicates...
There's a line in a Leonard Cohen song that has always stayed with me. It kept me going in a bleak moment in my life, when I thought, as we all sometimes do, that I couldn't see how good could come out of the dreck I had turned my life into. "Forget your perfect offering," Cohen advises. "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Happy Easter...