Word: sisyphus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...President doth protest too much." But by inference, Hughes' book makes one thing perfectly clear: No man should be elected to the office who comes to it in advance, as Lyndon Johnson and Rich ard Nixon did, with a built-in case of mild paranoia or a galloping Sisyphus complex...
...home for the insane. In The Contractor, which also had its U.S. première at the Long Wharf, Storey told of the daily war of work, the campaign that liquidates itself with the setting sun and must be fought again the very next day. Man and his toil-Sisyphus agonistes. Men put up a tent for a wedding party and then take it down. That is all that happens, and it is like watching an entire life unfold and then fold...
Speech is dispensed with in Act Without Words, in which Cronyn mimes the frustrations of a man lost in the desert who is variously tempted by water bottles that elude his grasp and ropes that foil his attempts to hang himself. The character is a kind of vaudeville Sisyphus, and one can thank Beckett for the small favor that the playlet lasts only ten minutes. Not I lasts 15. It is the seemingly final verbal spasm of a woman of 70 (Tandy) who recounts fragments of her life and concludes that even her suffering does not add up to much...
...Sisyphus condemned forever to roll a heavy stone up a steep mountain, the American taxpayer has long seemed fated to support indefinitely the ever-costlier needs of government. Now, surprisingly, the burden may be getting a little lighter-at least on the state and local level. For the first time since the late 1940s, state and local governments are beginning to show a collective surplus. Altogether, in this fiscal year, these government units are expected to take in about $ 138 billion-$7 billion to $ 12 billion more than they spend...
...Viet Nam admits to many analogies, but perhaps the most apt is that of Sisyphus, the mythical Corinthian king who was condemned forever to roll uphill a huge stone that constantly rolled back. So it is with the South Vietnamese...