Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tweed jacket. Like so many other unbelievers, Vanauken and his wife Jean dipped into Lewis upon urgings of Christian friends, began devouring all the Lewis books they could find, and wound up, to their surprise, as converts. Then Jean died of a liver ailment, and Vanauken plunged into despair. It was an astringent letter from Lewis that enabled Vanauken to make some sense out of her death-and his life. Longtime Bachelor Lewis later suffered similar tragedy when he married a woman he knew was dying of cancer...
...Hedda Gabbler the end lies in the beginning. An aristocratic woman whose talent and beauty were never realized, marries an academic who simply does not do her justice. Eventually, she is driven to despair and commits suicide. Director Scott Goldsmith plans to heighten the tension by playing on the similarity between his setting, a 19th century living room, and his theater, the Winthrop House JCR-living room, which, he says, can be interpreted as society trapping Hedda. Performances are tonight through Saturday and also next weekend...
...characters in Night-Side, Oates' latest collection of stories, lie on the boundary between existential despair and actual insanity. They are too sick to be tragic, but they are normal enough for us to recognize ourselves in them. The heroine of "The Snowstorm," for example, is a young woman named Claire who despises all personal attachments. When her car gets stuck in a blizzard, she chooses to walk home through the storm rather than appeal to anyone for help. Such isolation is intrinsically neither sick nor ugly. If Claire were a real person, we might guess that she had been...
...indictment of philosophers on behalf of ordinary people. But in that case, why doesn't Oates show any sympathy for all these ordinary, tortured people? Although she describes her characters with inhuman intelligence. Oates never shows the slightest hint of compassion for them. Her identification of existential despair and mental illness is not so much a psychological observation as a justification for her own misanthropy...
...takes characters and acreage through the incursions of a railroad, the depredations of bulldozer, drill and crane, and, ultimately, in the fall of 1972, to those hallmarks of Western civilization, the discount store and the parking meter. Yet Müller never stoops to cheap nostalgia or self-righteous despair. Each page is keyed to a child's comprehension; each of the meticulous landscapes shows compassion as well as irony in the face of the familiar. A companion suite, The Changing City, shows the same process in an urban environment, from the calm, dignified arrangements of turn...