Word: monstrously
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...like some kind of addiction. I couldn't help myself: I would see some new absurdity-now from the Spartans, now from the Helots-and an impression would come, and the clowning despair would rush over me, the total indifference to anything but the monstrous foolishness of human beings, and in a flash-or a giggle-I was at them. As my idiocy became familiar, it became safe. Children began to mock my eccentricities, or follow after me, mimicking my hobble. At last I had taught them something...
...cheek nerves with an awl. The first word of his first play-Merdre! as Jarry spelled it-discovered obscenity as a lisping child star and launched her on her modern stage career. That was 1896; Jarry was 23. His egg-shaped Père Ubu of monstrous honesty, the grotesque Dr. Faustroll with his science of 'Pataphysics and his Caesar-Antichrist are the collective grandparents of the theaters of cruelty and the absurd. As Jarry lay dying at 34-of an acute brain inflammation caused by tuberculosis and aggravated by drink-he was obsessed by that image of death...
Today the Etoile is the scene of monstrous traffic jams, as an estimated 200,000 cars are funneled every day into the grand circle from twelve avenues. Still, the place maintains its grandeur. All Paris seems to begin there, radiating majestically outward from the arch. The eternal flame flickers over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Against that setting, countless Frenchmen, who only a week before had solemnly laid a great floral Cross of Lorraine there to honor Charles de Gaulle, nodded approval of the demonstrators who marched down the Champs-Elysees toward the great landmark proclaiming: "Leave...
...informs Noah of the flood with monstrous banality. Bursts of thunder test the capacity of the amplification system, and huge projections of film stills on the back wall of the stage feature the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (creation), paintings of fleshy Renaissance nudes (corruption), and whirling Van Gogh suns (upheavals of nature). After that, the show lasts 40 days and 40 nights, with one 15-minute intermission...
...order. "One rules minds," he tells Colbert, "by appearances, and not by the true nature of things." Louis's myth grows like a cancer, implanting gratuitous bourgeois details with royal significance. With each new detail, the monarchy extends itself horizontally, until it envelops and supplants reality. It is a monstrous calculus at deceit, made all the more appalling by its success...