Word: despairful
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...nagging feeling of things out of control, a world approaching with too many people in it and too few resources to go around, an absence of faith that solutions are possible or leaders will be found to provide them. Rarely has this feeling been described with such elegant despair as that expressed by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing of France: "The present world crisis . . . is not just a passing perturbation but in reality represents a permanent change. If we examine the major graphic curves that are drawn for the future by the phenomena of our times...
Much of the current concern about language is only a pedant's despair. Some of the preoccupation masks a cynical delight in the absurdities that people are capable of perpetrating with words No one worries very much about the schoolmarm's strictures against am t and "it's me." Connoisseurs savor genuine follies like those of the new priests of thanatology, who describe dying as terminal living," or the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare who explained a $61.7 million cut in social services as "advance downward adjustments." But whatever mirth there may be in these...
...good chance" may seem a very modest resurrection for so much suffering. Like the old Armenians, Arlen is making another wager: on stoicism as the proper response to despair. It is both an honorable bet and a long shot - the only arguable portion of a unique and grieving book...
...vessel splash in the sea. Her decks were packed with people. Thousands of male heads in derbies. Thousands of female heads covered with shawls. It was a rag ship with a million dark eyes staring at him. Father, a normally resolute person, suddenly floundered in his soul. A weird despair seized him. The wind came up, the sky had turned overcast, and the great ocean began to tumble and break upon itself as if made of slabs of granite and sliding terraces of slate. He watched the ship till he could see it no longer. Yet aboard her were only...
...words of a young explorer from Venice. The Khan's dominions have grown in scope and compass out of understanding, their diverse, unimagined wonders lost in last formlessness. As Marco Polo describes the fantastic cities he has visited in his wanderings, his words are a dam against despair. The emperor hopes to discern in them, "through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing...