Word: morbidness
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...departure for Ruisdnel, these paintings depcit an allegorical subject. Moonlight strikes a tomb, a ruined cathedral looms in the background, dead beeches litter the foreground, shrouded women walk among the graves, all of which suggests the hopeless mortality of man and his inevitable doom. But Ruisdael is not entirely morbid, and he inclines a faint but perceptible rainbow on the horizon--a glimmer of hope and he possibility of rebirth...
...Hayman's attitude towards Kafka, it is, not surprisingly, less reverential that Max Brod's; Brod's biography seemed to be written chiefly as an antidote to the view that anyone who created Gregor Samsa must have been a dark and morbid character, though Brod's work is honest and engaging, we almost lose sight of all the self-torture in the radiance of the saint-like glow. Hayman's biography is more balanced, but also admiring (as anyone must be) of Kafka's incredible lack of cynicism, even as he was dying...
...most of the time it works. White cleverly knocks the values of a bureaucratic society in an imaginary letter to the tax collector, and the nosiness of certain do-gooders in a similar missive to the ASPCA. The morbid obsession with news is caricatured in the (very funny) story of a family--"marooned" on the island where they have always lived--that is killed when as Associated Press helicopter crashes from on high, the even more morbid obsession with games ridiculed in a lampoon of a future sport-mad-society where 197,000 would jam the Yale Bowl...
...screaming. Then I looked up ... and up ... and up ... and there, 14 stories above me, the front car climbed over the apex and began to plunge. My stomach did the opposite, rising inside me as though I was hurtling earthward at a 55-degree angle. I looked away. But morbid curiosity got the better of me, and I followed the train. It rose; it dipped; it soared; it whipped--spinning finally into a whirlpool of track to the base...
...rage" can cause an Adolf Hitler to act as he did, if it can cause men to attempt to assassinate Presidents and Popes, and shoot blank cartridges at Queens, why cannot "internalized anger and rage" cause the bowels to churn themselves into inflammatory masses, coronary arteries to turn into morbid spasms and bronchial tubes to go into asthmatic constrictions? There are many professionals who believe there may be a great psychosomatic component to Crohn's disease...