Word: decays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...decay and a platitude
English. Maurois skillfully retells the familiar story of the foppish, incredibly hypochondriac man, who, in a cork-lined, fumigated bedroom, wrote a mordant masterpiece about the decay of French society. Maurois heavily emphasizes the weaknesses in Proust's character-his dependence on his mother, his excessive need to be sure of the admiration of his friends, his failure to establish a normal love life, his toadying to decadent aristocrats. This Proust is a very sick man, but did his sickness dictate Remembrance of Things Past...
...There is no record of Papa Blum's answer; of Alsatian Jewish stock, a Parisian merchant in the reign of Napoleon III, he went right on selling laces and ribbons for a tidy profit. But son Leon rebelled against what he later called the dishonesty and decay of bourgeois capitalism...
...fault of Speed Lamkin '48 that the decay of Southern aristocracy and its struggle against industrialism are old stuff to most of us by now. One cannot expect a novelist in his early twenties to present many fresh insights into situations that have been so completely explored by more seasoned writers...
Dominating the tableau of aimlessness, decay and sterile joy is the image that gives the poem its name: the parched desert through which a wanderer struggles in search of an oasis. When he comes upon a chapel in the arid mountains, he significantly finds this symbol of faith broken and deserted-"There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home." But at the deepest point of despair, the rumble of thunder brings promise of rain to the waste land. The poem ends with the Hindu incantation, like the first shower of long-looked-for rain, shantih, shantih, shantih...