Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WHEN EDMUND WILSON received his B.A. from Princeton in 1916, he graduated into a world of disillusionment and eventual despair. His was the generation--in the words of his classmate and friend Scott Fitzgerald--that "had grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken". It was a generation not unlike...
Today's graduates might well envy such a spirit. Wilson knew the temptations of despair but he resolutely shunned them. Edmund Wilson's death must sadden us for it closes a chapter in our national cultural history that he himself helped write; but it also reinforces our own sense of purpose by throwing into relief a life of quiet heroism and insatiable curiosity...
...coincidence of the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam protests. This is the need to believe "we shall overcome"--easily, dramatically, totally, and soon. Dylan's later music is far more challenging, more realistic (though not at all compromised), digging up the substrata of human pain, anger, and despair. The irony is that if we could respond to these songs as energetically, we would probably be far closer than ever to exorcising evil in a human world...
...when he wondered, as he must have wondered, what effect his death would have on his small child? For all we learn, Alvarez might just as well be a tongue-tied stockbroker. The only flash of revelation comes after his recovery. He speaks of the source of his earlier despair as a prolonged adolescent expectation of life. Afterward he realized that he was simply and undramatically unhappy: "I had accepted that there weren't ever going to be any answers, even in death...
Permitting patients to make such choices helps prevent despair, Weisman believes. Hope requires only a degree of autonomy, a "conviction that we can change the world a little bit." One way of supporting a sick person's autonomy is to let him refuse "heroic" treatments that demean him by causing him to suffer "without adding significant survival." Another way is to let a patient plan his own funeral if he wants to. He should also be allowed to talk about his grief at dying and the probable reactions of his survivors without being told that he is morbid. Lastly...