Word: constant
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Middle class folks,* the doctors reported in last week's Journal of the American Medical Association, are particularly prone to psychosomatic (mindbody) troubles and chronic illnesses. One big reason is the American yen for "making good." The middle class works especially hard at trying to make good. The constant effort produces strains and tensions (people "feel the necessity to improve their condition, rather than to enjoy their existence"), which in turn produce unhappiness and maladjustments...
...uses them just as they come out of the tube, except for the addition of a little turpentine. Each picture starts with a fairly detailed charcoal sketch; he gradually simplifies it as he paints. This process of simplification, he says, is the very symbol of his life: "A constant struggle for complete expression with a minimum of elements...
...only did Edward demand of his friend such constant and lavish hospitality that his financial ruin was inevitable, but he made him the butt of more & more brutal practical jokes. Through it all, through ridicule, poverty, and obsolescence, Christopher remained a faithful paladin, faithful unto death, which he incurred through obeying a royal summons when...
...would be hard to find, in this day of soggy prose and involuted criticism, another modern essayist who yields such constant pleasure. (She wrote, said E. M. Forster, with "inspired breathlessness.") Unlike so many American critics who seem intent on smothering their readers with erudition, Virginia Woolf wrote as if she were conversing with friends. To read her essays at one sitting is too much of a good thing; they then seem a bit boneless and soft, their smoothness too consistently stylized. But taken one at a time, as they were written to be read, they are rare works...
Exceptional acting in the main roles overcomes the picture's constant danger of falling into absurdity. Katina Paxinou plays Ezra Mannon's voluptuous, murderous wife with such a convincing mixture of malice and weakness that one forgets completely that the character is itself unrealistic and even ludicrous. Her murder of Ezra is revenged by her two children, the weak Orin, and the strong Lavina (the Electra of Aeschylus). After killing their mother's lover and making her commit suicide, they are obsessed by their own guilt, and Orin, who is played superbly by Michael Redgrave, commits suicide himself, while Lavinia...