Word: despairful
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...rendered this desolate tale more humane and, I think, more complete. Perhaps not the sort of rediscovered affection that caps off Portrait of a Marriage, but maybe a glimpse into the middle seventies when through, say, a feminist sharing group, Mrs. Elliot would have the chance to communicate her despair with other ex-wives in the same aimless, professionless bind. One hopes so, at least, because she can't sit and stare at the symbolic wallpaper forever...
...great enthusiasm and little discrimination. He approached his reading with the same naivete apparent in his writing, accepting the literature of decadence as a manual for living. His bible for many years was Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. That Crosby's life of debauchery and despair was inspired by books rather than authentic feelings is effete in itself. And many of the maxims he gleaned from Dorian Graywere really only rehashes of Huysmans's A Rebours, which in its turn is often nothing better than warmed-over Baudelaire...
Toiling in an arcane area that totally baffles most ordinary mortals, mathematicians usually despair of even trying to explain their work to laymen. Yet recently two University of Illinois mathematicians announced a breakthrough of such widespread interest that even the reticent American Mathematical Society issued a rare press release. The news: after more than a century of futile brain racking, one of mathematics' most famous teasers-the so-called four-color conjecture-has finally been proved...
...barricaded." Sheila thinks it "a bad joke that when the people at home no longer believed in their religion, or went to church as they once did, the religious fighting was worse than ever." Later, during an argument with her brother, Sheila is blunt to the point of despair: "The Protestants don't believe in Britain and the Catholics don't believe in God. And none of us believes in the future...
...debate surfaced in another form when Jimmy Carter, speaking in Manchester' N.H., voiced vast concern about the state of the American family reciting a litany of despair on divorce, delinquency, illegitimate births, venereal disease and other scourges. Dedicated conservatives fear such talk portends a huge new program that will further classify, regulate and meddle with the American family, compounding the damage that has already been done (they claim) by the hundreds of schemes enacted in recent years. The conservatives do not understand, claim Carter and Vice-Presidential Nominee Walter Mondale. What they advocate, they say, is new Government attention...