Word: pessimistically
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Autobiography is everywhere apparent. The fumbling, hesitant lover, the suicide-bent pessimist, the intellectual incapable of action, the Piedmontese boy who even in the city never loses his love for his native mountains-these are all Pavese. His characters are en gaged in a relentless search to figure out what it is they want from a prosaic life; that too was Pavese. He was a lonely man, and his narrators are lonely; they are wanderers, loving solitude and yet caught up in the senseless rush of people who have a need for febrile action, drink and meaningless sexual bouts...
...false cheeriness in Pavese, and a candor that all who live by deluding themselves may find unwelcome but valuable. And there is a devotion to nature and to the virtues of the land that surprises the reader who thinks he is in the hands of a total pessimist. In near lyrical terms, Pavese expresses his warmest admiration for the peasants, their generosity and their capacity for honest work and robust living. As one of his characters replies when asked if he likes Mussolini's Italy: "Not Italy. The Italians...
...guess I'm a pessimist at heart," the Crimson coach said yesterday, "but I take that Penn-Princeton score to show more about Princeton's defensive strength than the weakness of the Penn Club. And don't forget, the Quakers are next to impossible to beat at home"-- which is where the Harvard booters play Penn this Saturday...
...giant trumpets of lead on the flogged horizons." At 21, he exchanged one desolation for another: the trenches of World War I. At 25, he witnessed the collapse of Italian culture under Mussolini. At 29, when he published his first volume of verse (Cuttlefish Bones), he was an apocalyptic pessimist who experienced "existence as entropy" and expressed the experience in language as acrid and compact as Dante...
Ready & Willing. Despite the political upheaval in Saigon, Thai is confident about his country's future. Quoting a French maxim, he observes: "The optimist says that the onion derives from the tulip, and the pessimist says that the tulip derives from the onion. It seems that in the case of Viet Nam the pessimist has often come close to being right, but has always been proved wrong in the end. The optimist, by contrast, has never proved himself right-but has yet to be proved wrong...