Word: sisyphus
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...long ago, discussion of death was largely a select European import -Camus, say, in The Myth of Sisyphus. Suddenly, death is an exceedingly popular topic in America. It is even an academic specialty: the University of Minnesota boasts a Center for Thanatological Studies, while U.C.L.A. has a Laboratory for the Study of Life-Threatening Behavior. On the lecture circuit, "the subject of death is now outdrawing the perennials-sex and politics," writes Roman Catholic Theologian Daniel C. Maguire in the current issue of the Atlantic. Maguire's essay describes a new genre he calls "the thanatology book...
...these brief sketches works. But the author does a fine turn on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and he perceives, in an epiphany whose correctness is apparent, that Economist John Maynard Keynes wrote not only The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, but also The Myth of Sisyphus, generally credited to Albert Camus, and Waiting for Godot, which has been claimed for Samuel Beckett. If you don't believe it, he argues, read all three works; the language is identical...
...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...