Word: gloom
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...write and the texts you haven't read are enough to keep you chained to your desk even if the Boston theaters were offering something to tempt you away, which they are not. And it's too cold to brave the lines for Superman. In short, sentiments of gloom and doom pervade the Harvard campus this month...
...women mass in daylong congregation, squat amid bundles and babies, haggle over prices, cluck over misfortunes and paw over food for sale. Not in Luanda. Its central market, a dank, echoing, three-story concrete structure, is virtually empty of food. Long, bare counters stretch away into the urine-scented gloom. Weighing scales swing empty in the hot breeze, and the women sit quietly, waiting...
...holidays, they say, and especially Christmas, inflame neurosis, trigger depression, accentuate loneliness. The very expectation of joy becomes a source of gloom. Adults get pressured into the hypocrisy of mingling with people they do not like and going to churches they do not believe in. Children get confused by the Santa hokum; they wind up either addicted to greed by too many presents or ridden with envy by too few. Families obliged to reassemble are rent by old grudges set to festering again. Furthermore, since Christmas dominates the marathon Thanksgiving-to-New Year's celebrations, non-Christians get painful...
...church in the 4th century picked, as Christmas Day, exactly the date that signaled the end of the Roman Saturnalia. The origin of the celebrations at least raises the question of which came first, seasonal malaise or the celebrations? Could it be that the rituals cure far more gloom than they precipitate? Surely such issues should not be abdicated entirely to social pathologists...
Quaint as that query may sound to an American, the impending shutdown of the venerable Times and Sunday Times of London is no footling affair to an Englishman. The gloom among Britain's Establishment could be as thick as suet pudding if the Times (circ. 293,000)-the nation's newspaper of record and the favorite forum of impassioned letter writers -suspends publication this week, as now seems likely. Equally wretched will be the 1.4 million readers who look to the Sunday Times for its weekly compendium of news coverage and lively analysis...