Word: despairs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
They were not given much of a chance. In the despair and disorder of the surrender, mutinous soldiers and sailors swelled the ranks of bellicose far-left parties, above all one whose members were known as Spartacists. Spurred on by the example of the one-year-old Bolshevik success in Russia and supplied by Lenin with propaganda and trained agents, the Spartacists sought and expected total revolution. To achieve it, they tried to destroy all moderate reformers, early and late displaying a fatal blindness to the German right, which in the form of the Nazi party finally destroyed left...
Rather, we might imagine, to supplement the right-to-left line for political stances, a linearly independent vector for romanticism. Left romantics want to change people because they despair that systems can be changed or because they believe that systems will change to fit the change of people's needs. Left-unromantics (pragmatists?) want to change the system to change the man (or perhaps for more abstract reasons, justice, etc.). George Orwell, in his essay on Charles Dickens, recognized the trends, saying, "They appeal to different individuals, and they probably have a tendency to alternate in terms of time...
When we compare the urban environment of Harvard with that of certain other large universities, we find cause neither for smugness nor despair. The precincts of the university, both in Boston and Cambridge, touch on the neighborhoods of the poor, both black and white. The Personnel Office seeks to recruit employees from a labor force that contains many persons who, owing to inadequate education, lack of skills, or a steady exposure to the barriers of racial discrimination, are chronically unemployed or underemployed. Within walking distance of Harvard are public facilities -- schools, hospitals, and recreation areas--that are dilapidated, undermanned...
...Ireland, he lacks vocation. He has little use for the fuddy-duddy reactionaries of Irish Catholicism, but he is almost equally unsympathetic to the new-style, gogo, golf-club-toting young priests buoyed up by their faith in sociology. Outside of the church, Father Conroy hardly knows which to despair of more-the ignorant Irish peasants whom he loves, or the smooth, gray-suited men of the future whom he fears justly for their visions of superhighways spanning the land for the greater glory of the tourist industry...
Still he can get no closer to his ideal, and his despair becomes briefly ridiculous and self-parodying: "Although I have the key she gave me, I forgot to ask her where she sleeps at night." Then he becomes tragically resigned, remembering with detachment his love for "the thirty-year-old debutante, whispering to ghosts in the room ...Jacqueline with the past in her eyes."He faces his failure sorrowfully: "It tears a boy's heart away, loving girls who don't care about love. " And he sees others in his own jaded condition; as he tells "morning girl," "Your...