Word: boredoms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...recounted in The Lost Childhood and Other Essays. On six different occasions he pressed a pistol to his temple, pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. He gave it up finally, not from fear, but because the excitement had gone: the game was no longer an effective antidote to the boredom which was the plague of his existence. It is here that we receive one of the few quick glimpses Greene allows us of his later life to let us know that nothing has changed. Boredom remains the great problem of his life...
...kind of Russian roulette remained too a factor in my later life, so that without previous experience of Africa I went on an absurd and reckless trek through Liberia: it was the fear of boredom which took me to Tabasco during the religious persecution, to a leproserle in the Congo, to the Kikutu reserve during the Mau-Mau insurrection, to the emergency in Malaya and to the French war in Vietnam. There, in those last three regions of clandestine war, the fear of ambush served me just as effectively as the revolver from the corner cupboard in the lifelong...
Another adolescent antidote to boredom was a flirtation with spying for Germany while still a student at Oxford in 1924. Greene wanted to do it out of an honest pity for the defeated nation, but he soon lost the pity and toyed with the idea of becoming a double agent. Luckily ("the life of the double agent is a precarious one"), international agreements caused his services no longer to be necessary. Greene played Russian roulette at eighteen. He became disillusioned with espionage at nineteen...
...less skilled singers there is the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus. David Smith has solved the boredom problem in Handel oratorios: Israel in Egypt is mostly choruses. Next term will be devoted to a wide range of pieces more technically demanding than the Handel. As for Harvard's forgotten children, the grad students, they too have vocal group--the Graduate Chorale. Gerald Moshell, conducting for his third year, will continue to emphasize twentieth-century repertoire. John Stewart has been commissioned by the Grad Chorale for this year's piece by a Harvard student...
...Last Picture Show seems modest to the point of extinction. Its actors are unknowns, its scene a Southwestern tank town, and its subject boredom. To make matters even less promising, it is not in color. Yet the choice of black and white, like the choice of cast and subject, is shrewdly apposite...