Word: joylessly
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...characters are the kind whose gay yet joyless lives make for gossip over countless canapes, but they have rarely been described with such quiet precision or understanding. Some of them are merely foolish, some merely mistake manners for morals, and some merely hurt themselves by being themselves. But the most interesting of them come close to having no self to hurt; they are hollow at heart, capable of sensation but not of feeling...
Still in his 20s and still living in Poland, Marek Hlasko writes the kind of story that the regime must find irritatingly lacking in proletarian joy. The young workmen in The Most Sacred Words of Our Life are indifferent to their jobs, cynical and joyless. The young hero is lyrically awakened by a beautiful love affair with a tender and passionate girl. He leaves her in the morning to rush to work, and discovers that three of his fellow workmen have had the same girl, that she has spoken to them the identical, sacred words of endearment...
...that no one can swim in the sea of life without the water wings of illusion. At its best, Some Came Running does reflect the cultural claustrophobia of small-town life and the personality quirks that sometimes go with it. At its frequent worst, it is a mishmash of joyless fornication, head-splitting hangovers, and a neo-Dreiserian conviction that life itself is a four-letter word...
...fight and third act reconciliation frame the play. They have an engaging son, Sonny, who hates people and collects pictures of movie stars, and a teen-age daughter, Reenie, who is afraid to be social. Cora's sister, Lottie, and Lottie's husband turn out to be rather joyless, too, under her veneer of exhilaration and his of complacency. By the end of the play, at least the first four characters have gone through some form of crisis and emerge somewhat better prepared for the future...
With Tony gone, things were pretty dull. Without the Moynihan flair, his merry circle of Mayfair friends were reduced to such joyless pleasures as dropping Coke bottles from party windows and wishing wanly that Tony would return. Last week Tony indeed came back...