Word: decayed
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West saw the economic collapse in -1929 as the outward sign of a long overdue spiritual decay, conceiving his characters not as microcosms of material injustices, but human beings cut adrift in an empty world. The bleakness of Miss Lonely-hearts and The Day of the Locust reflect West's own isolation. He was always very shy, had few friends and never attended school regularly. After graduating from college he left immediately for Paris and from a dark corner in Sylvia Beach's bookshop watched Joyce and Hemingway browse through the stacks...
...town, the streets are littered with crippled Volkswagens, discarded tires, bits of lumber and old 50-gallon oil drums. Even on the vast tundra, the tracks of World War II bulldozers are still plainly visible. Scars from 30-year-old seismic tests are unhealed. Debris remains and remains, its decay slowed by the cold. A piece of wood was recently retrieved from a depth of 1,400 feet, where it had been lodged between two coal seams many millions of years old. It looked like a fresh chip. In 1968, a search party dug up the body of Charles Francis...
...castle, the barbecue chef its master of the revels, the station wagon its chariot, the 8:03 or the clogged expressway its cup of doom. Few modern Americans feel much nostalgia for the farm or the small town, and most now find the once glittering big cities tarnished with decay. The pull of the suburb has been so strong that suburbanites are becoming the most numerous element in the U.S. population. According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, in 1970 suburban dwellers will number more than 71 million, taking a big lead over those inhabiting central cities (59 million) and passing...
...parties, or education, or traffic-but the whole thing, the whole enterprise. It is for this reason that we tend to be manic-depressive in our view of ourselves: one moment the greatest, strongest country on earth, the hope of the world; the next moment on the brink of decay and disaster. That is why American patriotism can be so strident, so naive, so defensive. The fiercest insistence that this is God's country, the most devout treatment of the flag as an icon, suggest an inner doubt, a sense of impermanence and vulnerability. The trouble is not excessive...
...American city is commonly portrayed as hovering on the brink of decay and disaster. Is this picture overdrawn? Indeed it is, according to a recently published book, The Unheavenly City, that has found favor with the Nixon Administration and has aroused considerable controversy among academicians. Combining a ruthless logic of argument with an engaging tolerance of tone, Edward Banfield, 53, professor of urban government at Harvard, contends that many urban problems are largely imaginary. In fact, says Banfield, the cities are performing better than ever...