Word: boredome
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fizzles contains fewer jokes and suggests that Beckett's exhaustion with prose is more advanced than his boredom with drama. There are flashes of the precise, pedantic syntax that hilariously dismembered logic in such earlier novels as Murphy and Molloy, but the dominant mood is elegiac: "For an instant I see the sky, the different skies, then they turn to faces, agonies, loves, the different loves, happiness too, yes, there was that too, unhappily." It is a twilight thought, stated carefully enough to stand up to the pressures of Beckett's singular vision: happiness is hard to bear...
...that familiar character of modern fiction, the wanderer who can in habit diverse places and situations as naturally as a hermit crab crawls into an abandoned shell. Unlike Edward, she accepts age and solitude without feeling boredom. Unlike Stephen, she can draw pleasure from watching dust motes dance in a shaft of light...
With the storm, of course, came endless varieties of winter havoc. Beyond snowball fights in the Yard and snowsculptures motivated more by reading period boredom than artistic yearning, the weather forced a bureaucratic scramble for the snowshovels...
Although returning to school after Christmas is a joyous relief from the boredom of vacation for some, for many freshmen it triggers another onslaught of homesickness aggravated by the prospect of the first set of exams...
Although Bukovsky himself was never tortured, he told of prisoners being beaten. "The worst thing was boredom," Bukovsky said. In the lunatic asylum run by the KGB, where he was confined from 1963 to 1965, Bukovsky had to endure countless hours of propaganda "reindoctrination," while the police doctors argued about whether his dissident views qualified him as a schizophrenic or a psychopath. In the asylum he found some textbooks for the study of English. "You know," he confided, "English grammar is funny-a bit mad to us Russians-so why not study it in a prison madhouse...