Word: sisyphus
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...icon of escape, Wolfgang Mattheuer's Die Flucht des Sisyphos (The Flight of Sisyphus), from 1972, is unmistakable. A worker is suspended in mid-stride, fleeing the path of the stone he has been pushing uphill; he's both dodging the plummeting boulder and heading for an idyllic valley. But here's the twist: when he painted it, Mattheuer was an avowed communist coddled by East German apparatchiks, yet the work is an obvious protest at the condition of life for ordinary folk in the G.D.R. - not the sort of thing one expects a state-supported artist to have produced...
...death-march of the argument over the novel notion, the heady idea: the sound of data crunching and uncertainty crushed beneath jackbooted convention. We drown the daisies in concrete and leave ourselves a toilsome ascent strewn with the rubble of our finest thoughts. And for what? At least Sisyphus realized when he was back at the bottom. We labor under the illusion that the ascent is never-ending...
...take out A Passage to India, but I know, like Sisyphus, that the struggle is useless. I can't concentrate under the present conditions: heavy, Dantean sighs abound; cell phones go off and everyone reaches into their pockets because they don't know their ringer style; bodies and bags are strewn over the floor in such disarray that you don't know which is which and the image reminds me of spaghetti and meatballs...
Back to work, Sisyphus! Israeli-Palestinian talks aimed at reviving the moribund peace process collapsed Wednesday, and both sides immediately called for Washington to intercede. "Netanyahu wants to slowly kill the Oslo Accords even while proclaiming his commitment to them," says TIME Jerusalem bureau chief Lisa Beyer. "He wants to keep the process going without ever achieving an end result. The Palestinians have no leverage, and Israel isn't going to be moved without pressure from Washington, which is unlikely to happen. So right now the peace process is a dead horse...
...cheered for the same damn play over and over...it was like watching Sisyphus do his labors," Dennis F. Gillespie '70 told The Crimson in December...