Word: languished
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...usually for the wrong things-usually only self-love-and the complacence which can come from believing you understand your vanity, is most harmful. Johnson writes of the treachery and hunger of the human heart and imagination: the need for hope, and the folly of self-deceptions which languish life away in the gloom of anxiety. Chekhov writes of the misery of overwrought people struggling to maintain self-control against unhappiness they do not understand. Both writers see themselves subject to the same errors and anxieties. Johsnon, despite his reputation as a prodigious moralist, majestically ordering life with indefatigable lucidity...
...Monday nights, the Advocate Board gathers about a rough-hewn, medieval table in the Sanctum, slouching in the grand wooden chairs with these mottoes carved in them, and talks about its own survival. Our emotions languish with the seasons, because there is seldom any heat in the building; during the winter, we huddle in our overcoats about the table (many choose to wear gloves and hats) or crouch like Milton's toad before the fireplace, burning old issues of The Advocate to keep warm. Exalted, we are artists, suffering through the cold moment of neglect. Our words perish...
...occasionally wonder if Vonnegut's writing will lose its appeal a few ages hence. Certainly life will continue to become even more complex and our minds will want to identify that this is happening to us. But will people drift out of the particular absurdities they now languish in and start speaking in a new idiom different from the one Vonnegut's characters used to speak? And would such an occurrence make the then readers unable to recognize the truth in the writing and hence not laugh? Well, fundamentally I believe that it is the cliches that will never change...
Like nearly all Soviet intellectuals, Sakharov bitterly attacks the trial of Writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, which he says "has been condemned by the progressive public in the Soviet Union and abroad and has compromised the Communist system. These two writers languish in a camp with a strict regime and are being subjected (especially Daniel) to harsh humiliations and ordeals...
...author's tone does not support this; it is so obvious that it doesn't support anything. It may also be argued that this is all part of a subtle master plan, as when novels are made boring to prove that the exquisitely bored characters that languish in them really find life boring. The danger in such cases is that one original, strikingly phrased thought could spoil the whole book. That pitfall has been avoided here...