Word: ennui
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...welcomed those it had once invited, it is very late. The grandparents who first came would have eagerly accepted the invitation. But their young have grown up in an alienated monoculture that has contempt for the godless decadence of French secularism with its empty churches, sexual license and existential ennui. France doesn't want them. They don't want the France they are throwing rocks at. But they are not leaving. And they are growing...
...allure of foreign-language films was twofold: they had class and they had sex. Ritzy Manhattan soirees were spiced with debates about what was real and what fantasy in Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad or Fellini's 8 1/2, about Antonioni's seductive use of existential ennui. And when foreign films didn't tax the brain, they stirred the loins. In pouty Brigitte Bardot, in statuesque peasant Sophia Loren, in the knowing rapture of Jeanne Moreau, Americans saw ideals of glamour more complex than Jayne Mansfield. Even Bergman gave you bosoms along with the angst. These films were invitations...
...between nations that had recently been at war, was a glorious cause. But for those under 35, the E.U. is not an earthly paradise in the making, but an unremarkable fact of life. Give it a constitution, with all the usual high-tone preambles? Like, why bother? A certain ennui with the great causes of the past, of course, does not translate into the sort of big C, red-in-tooth-and-claw conservatism familiar in the U.S. Labor market reform may be the watchword of European governments from Greece to Scandinavia, but defense of the "European social model" remains...
...difficult to imagine that teenagers living in a place filled with swamp snakes, blue-tongue lizards and wobbegongs (carpet sharks) would still experience itchy adolescent ennui: the desire for something--anything--to happen. But that's exactly what Winton deftly captures in his linked collection, set in the hardscrabble whaling town of Angelus, in Western Australia. We follow Vic, the most developed of the characters in the book, as he confronts the quagmire of family, the bitterness of pride, his own prickly regrets and the impossible, inescapable Australian landscape. It turns out he has more to fear from the dangers...
Then too, there is Europe to consider. Finally, after centuries, a purely European war is unthinkable, but the peace has difficulties. Rough times for Europe in 1985: high unemployment, signs of racism, terrorism, ennui. So far all the dreams of a unified Continent have resulted in a relatively successful economic alliance but not a political entity...