Word: eviler
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...their Christian friends in the U. S. Wrote these pre-eminent products of Christian missions: "There lies upon us and, we presume, upon you also, a great weight of care which religion alone can teach us to bear worthily. . . . Our religion teaches us that sin is immeasurably a greater evil than suffering. . . . Our people ... are being purified and uplifted by their present trials. . . . War is brutal, but it will ever be powerless to rob any of us of the transcendent peace of men who are at peace with themselves...
Musing on fighting words that could be and had been legally sent through the mails. General Hugh Samuel Johnson, himself no tyro at invective and abuse, suggested a few more: '"asymptote" ("a daisy of a word"), "parasang," "Cush-ping Dishpit." ("an evil sound and no meaning"), "yellow-bellied sap-sucker," "boat-bottomed grackel." "bottle-nosed puffin...
...vaudevillians in a speakeasy. One of them has the sinister talent of worming the truth out of people, and drags from a dwarf and a ventriloquist their tragic, bleeding stories. Appalled by the knowledge of so much other suffering in the world, Clancy momentarily damns the world as evil; then affirms that man, through the exercise of his will, can make the world good...
What is powerful in Here Come the Clowns is not its tricky story nor its Sunday-school philosophy but its ominous, troubled atmosphere. The hypnotic "illusionist," with his Mephistophelean sense of evil; the hysterical emotions of the dazed people he operates upon; the submerged, intolerable griefs that he forces them to stammer out-these have the kind of horror found in Thomas Mann's famed story Mario and the Magician. Melodramatic, a little shrill, a little unearthly, Here Come the Clowns is like a grotesque tune played on a broken fiddle...
When Barry attempts to sum up his allegory of good and evil in words, and to affirm man's redemption through his own powers of godliness, it is all too plainly the author speaking, not the characters. If this summing up is bad because of its clumsy preaching, it is also bad because its very explicitness shatters a mood whose strength lies in its eerie, wordless power of suggestion. Barry's people, never quite real, can haunt the audience as unhappy spectres; as stock symbols in a morality play, they merely irritate...