Word: paines
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Julian is an English economist in his middle 30s-or has been one, since economics can describe only the past or the future and his attention has been sharpened down to pain's single vivid dimension, the present. He shelters a crab: cancer. The effort of concentrating properly on the crab's requirements makes him weave and shake like a drunk. He is not a drunk; alcohol cannot touch the pain or the concentration that balances it. When the pain becomes so demanding that there is no awareness left to walk with, though, Julian stops...
With similar logic he puts down Somerset Maugham, not for slickness but for lacking a religious sense. Maugham, he writes, is an agnostic "forced to minimize-pain, vice, the importance of his fellowmen. He cannot believe in a God who punishes and he cannot therefore believe in the importance of a human action." Like Greene himself, Maugham often explored the old British theme of the Imperial dropout, the white-man-going-to-hell-in-the-tropics. But Maugham's doomed colonials could not go to hell-they could only go to the dogs...
...poet named Jeuan Gethin set down some measure of it: "We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance . . . It is seething, terrible, wherever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried under the arms, a painful angry knob . . . " The phantom he described was bubonic plague, the Black Death that reached Sicily from the East in 1347 and within three years killed nearly half the population of Europe...
...observers who also described correctly the buboes, or underarm swellings, that told of death in five or six days, and the congested lungs of the even deadlier pneumonic form of the plague that killed within two or three days. Gethin's lament is remarkable because it makes the pain and terror vivid 600 years later. The authors of these two books on the Black Death mention the consistently abstract, numb quality of most contemporary chronicles...
...stock market's $100 billion decline since mid-May has wounded every kind of investor-amateur and professional, neophyte and veteran, racy speculator and wary conservative. The psyche has been hurt as badly as the pocketbook, and the pain of loss is sharpened by the thought of what might have been. Though every investment is a risk, more investors than usual are furious at their brokers for having talked them out of selling last spring, when they could have cashed in rich profits...