Word: dismalness
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...point of no return. Lord Jim, which read like a boy's story, was actually a painful parable of the penance a man must do to reclaim honor lost in one moment of cowardice. In Heart of Darkness, the most enigmatic of his novels, Conrad used as background his dismal experiences in the Belgian Congo. Its protagonist Kurtz is a portrait of a man whose pure will-to-power has squandered itself hopelessly. In the epigraph to The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot saluted this defeat: "Mistah Kurtz?he dead," quoted Eliot, recognizing that no man is more hollow than...
National Problem. Wherever he went on his dawn-to-dusk schedule* -San Angelo, Texas, Woodward, Okla., Clovis, N. Mex.-Ike faced the same brown, dismal picture. He sympathetically questioned the farmers and ranchers ("How much water are you pumping? What did you get out of your dry fields?"), frequently found in the hard-pressed people a surprising resoluteness-a "chins-up" attitude, as he expressed it. And they sensed that, because the President was there, their problem was now recognized as a national problem...
...group of seven Seattle psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, banded together as the Blakeley Psychiatric Group, went to Architect Kirk with a special problem. As one of them stated (with some symptoms of frustration): "Situated in the business district and open to the distractions of an apartment hotel, we run a dismal gauntlet-slamming doors, dripping faucets, a view of an alley, rattling trucks and an s.o.b. who dotes on playing the banjo. Once my attention was taken from a patient by the sight of a whisky bottle swinging on a string outside my office window." They wanted a new building custom...
...president in charge of promoting annual, trumped-up presentations of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. For the first of this season's versions, televised last week, the VP persuaded CBS and Chrysler's Shower of Stars to turn the durable old holiday cliche into elaborate but dismal humbug...
...Magnificent Seven (Toho; Columbia). Arms and the men have seldom been more stirringly sung than in this tale of bold emprise in old Nippon. In his latest film, Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon) has plucked the epic string. And though at times, in the usual Japanese fashion, some dismal flats and rather hysterical sharps can be heard, the lay of this Oriental minstrel has a martial thrum and fervor that should be readily understood even in those parts of the world that do not speak the story's language. Violence, as Kurosawa eloquently speaks it, is a universal language...