Word: sisyphus
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...speech was an admonition rather than a clarion call. Significantly, the President was at his most stirring when he praised slow and painful effort, in a passage that evoked the labor of Sisyphus and seemed to allude not merely to Johnson's own methods, not merely to the U.S., but to the condition of man. The Great Society, said Johnson, "is the excitement of becoming-always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting and trying again-but always trying and always gaining...
...Like Sisyphus, doomed to his meaningless life of pushing the boulder up the mountain, The Woman and her man, must shovel each night knowing that the constant sand slides make it a never-ending task, and they finally emerge absurd heroes in their own way. As Sisyphus must be imagined happy, so too are man and woman revealed as not digging sand to live but living to dig sand...
...they realize their feebleness before a brutally uninterested universe. In his own life-work, say as a teacher, a person may be making some one class-room serviceable to a few children. But he will feel, as the more imaginative teachers do, that his work is like that of Sisyphus, he no sooner achieves a thing than it is undone. How can he educate a child for a few hours a day, when the home, the streets, the newspapers, the movies, the shops, are all busy miseducating? Wherever there is a constructive man at work you are likely to find...
...probably not sufficient to relate Mr. Gunn's heroes to the convention of the "broken Coriolanus," or more contemporaneously and thus more deceptively, that of the cardiac Sisyphus. The quality of "starriness" central to the title poem and one other, entitled "Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt," is that "disinterested, hard energy" by which Nobody holds Nothing-at-all at bay. Mr. Auden's "ironic points of light" flashed out among a decimated signal corps on the last battlefield of love; Mr. Gunn's stars are self-sufficient. Where Donne tossed and scrambeld known quantities and academically-sanctioned categories, where Shakespeare talked...
...Ronald Knox. d) Nevil Shute. 89. Died. A 46-year-old author (The Myth of Sisyphus) who would have considered the way he died, in a speeding sports car, absurd. His name: a) Nevil Shute. c) Ronald Knox...