Word: infirm
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Exit the King, one of Ionesco's later and more elaborate plays, is a ritualized orchestration of one man's death. Beranger, the infirm king of a wasted nation, lapses into childhood memories, sensuous daydreams, and anguished tirades while trying to understand his impending doom. One of his wives, the hateful Marguerite, and the attending physician, urge him to "abdicate" his life. His second wife Marie stands opposed--consoling him with love and hope, beckoning him to resist death...
...machinery of the Irish Republic's ruling Fianna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny) had rarely run more smoothly. In northeast Dublin, its workers delivered scores of voters to polling places in a shuttle of buses. In the Rialto district, they assembled strange processions of the elderly and infirm who looked as if they could scarcely make it to the nearest park bench, much less to the ballot box. There was even a Spanish nun, a fervent supporter of Prime Minister Jack Lynch, who appeared at one Dublin polling place to vote for the local Fianna...
...modest collection. Still, Walter Benjamin, unpacking his library, noted that "the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books." And there is, embedded in such infirm companions, a subtle aura, reminiscent of the sorrow which leaps up from the pages of old photograph albums: it could be called the aesthetic composition of a moment in time, where all the properties of a retrieved past appear in the present eidetic, solemn, and ill-at-ease...
...strandee by making a repatriation loan for the price of a return ticket, plus a small subsistence allowance-both on condition that the strandee surrender his passport. The State Department then holds the passport until the loan is repaid. In practice, only the mentally ill, the seriously injured, the infirm, the aged and "those with a hardship story good enough to make strong men weep," to quote a longtime observer, have any hope of being repatriated...
...abroad or to pay his fare home," insists Ralph Cadeaux, chief of special services at the U.S. consulate in London. Some 300 young supplicants call on Cadeaux every week. In bona fide emergencies, he lets them call home from the consulate-collect. In Paris, only the seriously injured, the infirm and those with a hardship story good enough to make strong men weep have any hope of parting the consulate from $235 for air fare home and a $40 subsistence allowance. Of the hundreds of hard-luck kids whom consular officers interviewed last year, only eleven passed his truth test...