Word: monomania
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Tragedy of Christiane. Somebody was sure to get hurt by such a monomania, and somebody did. On his return from Italy, Goethe took up with a factory girl named Christiane Vulpius, a charming young thing of 23 who, as he once remarked, "made the mattress shake." To Goethe, the affair was a convenience; to Christiane, it was a tragedy. The court of Weimar called her "Goethe's pig," and he did not allow her to share his table when company was present. As the years passed, Christiane took to drink and ran to fat. After 20 years...
Stavros declares that he keeps his honor safe inside himself: "I believe that in America, I will be washed clean." But his obsessive hankering after America goes unjustified. The film even suggests that Stavros' monomania is sheer materialism. On the ship he throws away his fez, pledging to buy himself a straw boater in the new land. Was it then greed that drew him to the United States? Even his concern for his family does not balance the absence of higher motives...
Messing with the Masses. As friends should, Frost and Untermeyer came to have few illusions about each other. Both were aware of Frost's monomania and his overwhelming intolerance of anyone who dared to disagree with him. "Sometimes I can think of no blissfuller state," Frost wrote, "than being treated as if I was always right." A constant target of his letters was Untermeyer's leftish reformism. "When you can write poetry like 'Jerusalem Revisited'," Frost railed in 1930, "why will you continue to mess with the masses (or is it mass with the messes)?" Frost...
...completely overcome by his vision, acclaims the event as a perfect culmination, and the pageant (a dozen masked and caped men dancing to a frightening chorus of parallel fifths and thundering drums) becomes a celebration of death. Horrified, the son Richard shrinks from his father, who forgets his monomania in an attempt to regain Richard's affection; but the pageant sweeps him off, and Babe's lesson (for such it is) suffuses the Loeb: the vision Walter uses to order the world with wisdom and dignity ends by ordering...
Last week the ritual was being repeated in ballrooms and cinemas all over Britain with a fervor that bordered on monomania. The British were out-bingoing the U.S. on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of the most game-happy Boston parish. The Mecca ballroom chain stages afternoon bingo games in 40 dance halls across Britain. But to bingo-mad mums, matinees at the Mecca were not enough, and the operators now promise bingo at least one night a week. Last week women began queueing outside one London hall at 7 in the morning to be sure of getting...