Word: despaired
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...that time, Thackeray had never quite decided which to be. As a schoolboy, made miserable by a too massive head and painfully nearsighted eyes, he was "licked into indolence, abused into sulkiness, and bullied into despair." He took his revenge on his schoolmasters and schoolmates by drawing cruelly accurate caricatures of them in his schoolbooks. As a young dandy in Paris, he was happiest hobnobbing with Left Bank artists, Bohemians "and fellows of that sort." And these friends could often find him laboriously copying paintings in the Louvre in the hopes of becoming, like them, an artist...
Citizens of their time, they lived in a nation that had both prosperity and peace, but enjoyed neither. If others felt bewilderment and despair, was it strange that the writers did too, and showed it not only in what they wrote, but in what they proved incapable of writing? Most writers were unable to see life whole, and unsatisfied with illumining only fragments of it. Even the humorists, who were few, wrote as if they had solemnly resolved: humor must and shall be preserved...
...Gallery, a novel of a G.I.'s experiences in Naples, Charles Christian Wertenbaker's story of the French Forces of the Interior (Write Sorrow on the Earth), Godfrey Blunden's novel of Moscow and Muscovites in their grim winters of war and political despair (A Room on the Route). William Wister Haines's Command Decision, a tense story of hard choices at an A.A.F. headquarters, was made into a hit play on Broadway. The Steeper Cliff, David Davidson's novel of a search for the meaning of intellectual courage in postwar Germany, was the best...
Last week China had two firsts: her people went to the polls in a national election, and her currency dived to a new low -it now took more than $100,000 (Chinese) to equal $1 (U.S.) The two events, one symbolic of hope and the other of despair, were intimately connected in Chinese minds, in world politics and in the U.S. conscience...
...When despair and bouncing checks begin to plague the card-fancier, he often takes deluded refuge in a poker game called "barber's itch." Here two people split the pot, and the rest split blue chips into red chips and red chips into bits of grimy paper...