Word: despairful
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...beneath the high-flying rhetoric and green and white balloons, there was frustration and despair. As the clock runs out, the ERA movement remains at a standstill. In Manhattan, Pioneer Feminist Betty Friedan called for "an emergency mobilization." But even she conceded: "It's going to take a miracle...
Which doesn't say much. There's enough ridiculous trash out there to make anyone despair over America, even if it is only the persiflage. It's not just the media, either, though that is the prime offender. T.V., fake food, all of it is enough to get on your nerves. Yet, to get too obsessessed with the trash is probably as bad as actually taking your laundry seriously--you're still only working with superficialities. People like McLuhan never seemed to know that...
...magnitude of his vision, its absorption into myth, precluded as grand an attempt." There would, of course, be great sculptors after Rodin, but none of them, not even Henry Moore, was able to release such torrents of expressive power from the sole image of the human body. Pathos, energy, despair, entropic exhaustion, orgasmic pleasure: every shade of meaning, every opposed sensation that the body can display, found its way into his oeuvre...
Then there is the refusal to submit to external schemes or narratives. The Gates of Hell cannot be read as clearly as a Renaissance fresco or a medieval Last Judgment. It is less about divine doom than the condition of secular despair, mauvaise foi, the unrooting of the self-a vast and almost illegibly complex dirge that touches now and then on the original imagery of the Inferno but does not, in any strict sense, illustrate it. Yet its formal properties-the sudden shifts of scale, the aggressive protrusions of figures from the bronze skin, the sense of strain...
...Dear Hi. Miss you. Jean." Yet one can too easily see Tarnower writing back: "Dear Jean. Good to hear from you. Hi"-the absence of things in certain letters being more devastating than their presence in others. Nothing says more than a light, frisky note to a friend in despair...