Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...will wrestle with the current housing crisis precipitated by the increasing unpopularity of the Quadrangle. "I think it would be nice to make a decision," she says, without committing herself to one. "There are some problems at the Quad, but it's hardly a place of despondency and total despair. I think too that some of the virtues of the River Houses are exaggerated. After all, their paint peels...
...visual meaning in Islamic calligraphy. One can visually enjoy the writing on an 8th century Koran page: the angular Kufic script done in a swordsman's strokes, decisive and muscular; the rich gold foliations round the white chapter heading; the placement of red dots, fit to make Mondriaan despair. Nevertheless, it is frustrating not to be able to read the page. (In a less exalted context, this becomes an advantage: neon signs never look more beautiful than in Arabic...
...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...