Word: cynicisms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that they can be redeemed, right here, right now, if they just put their minds to it. But, as the Scientologists themselves say, if it’s not true for me, then it’s not true. I imagine I’ll always be an inarticulate cynic. I’ll also always surprise myself, for better or worse. And maybe, just maybe, Scientology wouldn’t be the worst thing, after...
...Dour of disposition and without family, he's drawn to his hot-blooded Croatian nurse, Marijana Jokic, whose troublesome brood he offers to support. At which point "the unattractively freckled, somewhat fleshy shoulders" of Elizabeth Costello appear up his stairs. Is she an authorial intervention? A meddling cupid? A cynic about his real intentions with the Jokics, whom she sees as more avaricious than angelic? Or is she the amputee's perfect companion? In Slow Man, she's all of the above, and a wonderful literary conceit to boot. But most of all, she's a refreshingly down-to-earth...
...think she's based on the part of me that is an outsider, but because I've always been this company person, I've never really been able to play that cynic card. I wouldn't be so stupid as to do that...
...world view is devoutly frosty. "Sometimes," he tells her, "I look at my voluntary isolation and think I'm in Hell. That I'm already dead, though I don't know it. My life has been shit. A thoroughly meaningless, idiotic life." Looking at the old cynic, Marianne can't help smiling...
...author is not an especially convincing cynic. His sustained interest is in power and reputation in the literary world. He yearns to be "a real great writer," not a "fake great man" like his father, Harold Spender, a journalist, biographer and author of books on government and mountaineering. Sir Stephen addressed the issue in his poem The Public Son of a Public Man: "When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes,/ I was your son, high on your horse,/ My mind a top whipped by the lashes/ Of your rhetoric, windy of course." Auden cut a more attractive father...