Word: pitilessly
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...with pitiless banality, time passed." So writes James T. Farrell on page 399 of his 18th novel, accurately describing the way time has passed for his characters, and for the reader, in the preceding 398 pages. Banality is what Farrell's novel is about, and it is also the novel's sole literary device. The people of the book are joyless, hateless, empty of good or evil, fleshy machines that transmit at the audible level the prattle of Babbittry and, octaves above, the silent scream of tedium. The prose in which they are described is also joyless...
...Chalk Garden. Transplanted from stage to screen, Enid Bagnold's witty, pitiless and elliptical high comedy yields only a withered bouquet of hearts and flowers. Made by Producer Ross Hunter, who customarily trafficks in Doris Daysies, the movie is all thumbs, none of them green...
...significant about that? Nothing, says Max. So why don't those lens-happy "reporters of the international scandal press" leave him alone? Soliloquizing in the West German daily Die Welt, onetime Journalist Schell added: "They squat like monkeys in trees, they hang like grape clusters from airliner stairways. Pitiless as wasps, they live off the blood of prominent personalities. In the private sphere, permission of the person photographed should be required...
...shows why. Most of them are scenes of World War I, sketched with a fury on plain brown wrapping paper. Their strident picturing of cavernous shell craters, socket-eyed cadavers, skull-like gas masks. bloody vines of barbed wire and battered nerves has much the same pitiless sting as Goya's gruesome series of etchings. The Disasters of the War. Man's shreds of nobility as well as his flesh rot away into humus. A flower casually grows through the clenched hand of a corpse, petals sprout from his chest...
University policy is always complex. Ramifications lurk in the shadow of every act that looms in the pitiless sun of time. Concatenations foul the keel of the administration propelled by decision. Thus it is with no little circumspection that the University must approach the task presented it by 2250 insurgent undergraduates...