Word: ennui
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...years. Born in America and educated in England, Stephen goes to Berlin in the '20s as "a runaway puritan." There he samples "every kind of pleasure, vice, shame and mental anguish," and returns to England a jaded 22, convinced that the only valid emotion is boredom, "or ennui as I preferred to call it." Into the midst of ennui steps an older woman named Elizabeth Rydal, a sensitive novelist of the Virginia Woolf persuasion, with grey eyes and a "long amused mouth...
Like any active man shunted into sudden retirement, Adams, then 65, dreaded having time on his hands. "Ennui, when it rains on a man in large drops," he wrote, "is worse than one of our northeast storms; but the labors of agriculture and amusement of letters will shelter me." Adams gradually slacked off on farm chores, but nothing ever slaked his thirst for letters. He lived to boast of reading 43 books in his 82nd year, and it was in his study, at the hoary age of 90, that he died...
...catch his subject unaware, "before the fizziness in his momentary mood becomes still and flat." The fizz is still in Sickert's best paintings: his nudes resting on the rumpled bed of his dingy studio, the Sunday afternoon dejection of the middleaged, parlor-bound couple in Ennui, the ironic, over-the-shoulder glimpse of a bedroom dialogue in The Prevaricator...
...socialism in Britain is strangling in dividual liberty in the historic citadel of liberty. Many a farmer and small business man told Dos Passos what an intellectual phrased most sharply: "England's dead, quite dead, quite. We're the lost island of the Atlantic, sunk in everlasting ennui, the Scandinavian ennui...
They opened the doors of the Old south Theater around midnight last Saturday and three thousand yards of seersucker rolled out. exam period ennui and a revival of the dozen year old Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers performance in "Top Hat" combined to pipe half of Harvard over the river and into Boston...