Word: miasma
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...central to his own thought. Unlike Girandoux and Cocteau, so often careless and fanciful in their dramatic use of Greek "gods" and fate, Sartre adopts the symbolic fable of the House of Atreus as a serious medium for analysis of social guilt. He throws the uprooted Orestes into a miasma of remorse and penitent masochism. But in portraying Orestes' collaboration with Electra to avenge the murder of their father, Sartre avoids abstraction and presents his characters concretely...
...sight of Manhattan's towers, Newark is a grimy, sprawling industrial ghetto, heir in full measure to nearly every urban malady of modern America. Its rich are few, its poor numerous, its population of 405,000 nearly equally and often acrimoniously divided between black and white. The miasma of the oil refineries in the nearby Jersey meadows hangs over the city, and so, too, does the pervasive smog of crime and corruption...
...same assumption casts a miasma over all education. It reinforces the view that what is real are our models, of which experience is only illustrative; as opposed to the view that was is real is experience, of which our models are feeble, segmented attempts at mimesis...
...Northwestern University believes that euphemisms persist because "lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable." It is virtuous, but a bit beside the point, to contend that lies are deplorable. So they are; but they cannot be moralized or legislated away, any more than euphemisms can be. Verbal miasma, when it deliberately obscures truth, is an offense to reason. But the inclination to speak of certain things in uncertain terms is a reminder that there will always be areas of life that humanity considers too private, or too close to feelings of guilt, to speak about directly. Like stammers...
...carried that reputation abroad on a series of spectacular world tours. Everywhere he went, he was acclaimed as the embodiment of a new Russia dispelling the miasma of its Stalinist past. Enjoying it all, Evtushenko took to offering political pronouncements at press conferences. Since many of his audiences assumed him to be as critical as they were of Communism, he more and more found himself driven to the defense of his country and-dismayingly to many of his admirers-its system and some of its injustices as well...