Word: cynicism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After ten years of this, both members of the marriage see the error of their ways. As Lorabelle settles down, Henry takes wing. Together they build a house and a family; together they remain till the end. Yet till the end she remains a romantic and he a cynic. "In all that he did," the narrator concludes, "he could see himself striving toward a condition of love or truth or goodness that did not exist. But he stayed with it because he knew there wasn't anything else...
...CLEMENS AND MARK TWAIN, by Justin Kaplan. No one disputes Mark Twain's lofty position in literature, but Author Kaplan's searching biography reveals him as an embittered and despairing cynic who courted the values of his time and despised himself for doing...
...wants to spell out the middle-class vapidities rejected by youth, he naturally heads straight for the shore where "the grockles" turn out in force. Grockles are the holidaying suckers of all ages, gathering junk in shabby souvenir shops, having their pictures taken, and eating anything, says one young cynic, "so long as it's with chips...
...central a character, he has remarkably few lines and I could draw no coherent impression from what he made of them. Hurd, as Moritz, is very close to an excellent performance; in his wavering voice, he implies perfectly the theatrical nature of the 14-year-old poet cynic. I thought, however, that he used gestures and movement remarkably little for so excitable a character. Miss Kelly's Wendla is a fine performance from beginning...
...nothingness encounters the Rousseauistic myth of the innocent child of nature, the noblest savage of them all. David Carradine plays the Inca with marmoreal stoicism, and Shaffer gives him a primitive sign-and-grunt language that sometimes reduces the son of the sun to the son of Tondeleyo. The cynic in Pizarro becomes enthralled by the savior in Atahuallpa, who has a shining conviction that his godhead will raise him from the dead. Pizarro dreads but courts the great Inca's murder. If Atahuallpa is resurrected, might not Christ have been? Through the night, the old conquistador keeps watch...