Word: frail
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...surface message, the "never-say-die" competitiveness that pulls Teddy through hard times and tough fights, literally assaults the audience. Alden litters the play with examples of Roosevelt's "bully-ness". A frail, asthmatic child painfully builds his body into the epitome of physical fitness and manages to excel athletically at, of all places, Harvard College (from which Roosevelt graduated in 1880, and which he describes in the play as teeming with "intensely languid" people). Stricken with grief at the age of 26 when both his mother and his first wife die on the same day, Roosevelt abandons a budding...
...bigger than a thumbnail, but its outsize heart is beating strongly. Under its thin, transparent outer tissue, the disproportionately large brain is clearly visible, and the frail, curving backbone appears to end in a tadpole-like tail. Arms have already formed, along with a thin network of blood vessels, a darkly pigmented eye, and features that will soon be transformed into mouth, lips and ears. Miniature webbed fingers can be seen forming within a paddle-shaped hand. Only 40 days after its conception, this tiny, throbbing bundle of life is recognizable as a human embryo...
Last week Jayaprakash Narayan, a long time force in Indian politics, addressed a rally of 200,000 supporters at a fairground outside New Delhi. Speaking from a reclining position because of an illness contracted during his recent stay in prison, the frail 74-year-old statesman worked the crowd into a chaotic frenzy with his low-key call for the defeat of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in next month's parliamentary elections. As he spoke quietly but passionately about the brutal repression and loss of political freedom under Gandhi's rule, Narayan was frequently interrupted with wild cries of "Long...
...even more puzzling to this woman than Simone's lifetime of asceticism was Weil's noble yet awful and haunting death. The end came in forced war-time exile from France, when Simone Weil, frail since childhood and now suffering from tuberculosis, chose to starve herself to death in British hospitals rather than accept more food than prisoners of war were offered inside occupied France. With what one doctor later called "total lucidity of mind" and a saintly air of peaceful self-possession, Weil drove herself to the point where her body could no longer take in enough food...
...wrote at the Lycee for her intellectual mentor, the philosopher Alain, Weil had stressed the conviction that to make her life worthwhile--to not "waste death," as she once put it--she would have to exert her Will against the seemingly infinite limitations that life presented (her own frail body, her recurring headaches, the constraints on social and political change in her lifetime). This doctrine of Will seems to have provided a mission and to have met her psychological and emotional need for expectation, devotion and objective response...