Word: despairful
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Some of the notables invited to the convention in that summer of 1787 simply refused to come. One, Virginia's Patrick Henry, said of the gathering in Philadelphia that he "smelt a rat." Others came and found the impassioned arguments profoundly dispiriting. "I almost despair of seeing a favorable issue to the proceedings of the convention," George Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton, who had already gone back to New York City, "and do | therefore repent having had any agency in the business...
...place of an absorbing whole. Vidal obviously sees his characters stumbling into the same folly of worldly dominion that has undone all previous empires. On the other hand, the end is not yet. And while life remains, it is probably smarter and more profitable to be charming than to despair...
...answer eludes him, and his quest points toward despair. Thoughts, he decides, "don't get us anywhere; our speculations are like a stationary bicycle." But Kenneth's huffing and puffing amount to an engrossing spectacle: a mind, albeit weird, attempting to make sense out of the overwhelming flood of data that most people dismiss as daily life. Despite, or perhaps because of, what the narrator calls "my divagations and aberrations, my absurdities," More Die of Heartbreak crackles with intelligence and wit. The novel is not only proof that Bellow, 72, can live up to his own standards; it is also...
Sometimes Phillips is almost willful in her virtuosity, and sometimes she is borne along too easily on waves of rhythmic prose. Nevertheless, her range is considerably greater than is common among her despair-addicted contemporaries, as is her fugitive grace. Where Ann Beattie's characters, for instance, are habitually on Valium, Phillips' are generally on speed; while Beattie's have surrendered to nothingness, Phillips' are still in search of something. Nearly all the stories in Fast Lanes are, like their characters, fascinated with gymnasts, tightrope walkers and others who find ways to steady and ground themselves. And the best...
Criticism, muckraking and its attendant skepticism have always been big business in Washington, a necessary part of a healthy democracy. The worry expressed above is that criticism is becoming the only business in Washington. Are we institutionalizing despair? The failings of humans who try to run this republic are legion, including those of not only Reagan but now Gary Hart, who wanted Reagan's job. And this week we can add a lot of names from the Navy, caught up in the tragedy of the Stark. Nothing seems immune. When Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall knocked the sacred 200-year...