Word: sordidness
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...machine, of the group, of science, of any one of the bugaboos which are our modern dragons and goblins, upon the individual, has become immense. That the Verlaine of absinthe and pomegranites should make a pilgrimage to the Holy City cannot seem entirely unrelated to the somewhat sordid suicide of four promising American undergraduates within the space of a few weeks. The only explanation that is sufficiently vague to be true is that of failure to adapt oneself to an inevitable, remorseless environment, an environment of natural hardship and of social horror. The biologist would claim...
...terrible suffering to women in the "birth race" which is sure to ensue for this money. I can think of only one way to stop it, but please print my idea. It is not "highfalutin," but is based on the fact that men will act only from the most sordid self interest...
...some times cloudy, sometimes thin, that tones were tossed this way and that, sometimes too negligible to be tones at all. That evening she was no prima donna. She was Katiusha, loveliest of peasant girls, wrongly accused of the murder of a drunken patron; Katiusha, proud of her sordid conquests, begging money of the man who would reclaim her soul and then-a new Katiusha, who, renouncing him with three symbolic kisses of the Russian Easter, shouldered a pack to follow a fellow convict into Siberia. Tristan and Isolde, laid away for several seasons now, was brought...
...philosophy of reality struggles to reveal itself. Facts are not reality, are merest illusions of the senses. Fiction of the imaginative mind is the only true reality. Hence the pity of it: a poor girl torn out of her last shred of beauty, revealed even in death, a sordid fact...
Edgar Allan Poe once published a triumph of the imagination entitled "The Balloon Hoax," purporting to tell the tale of an enterprising newspaper's fictitious account of a balloon crossing the Atlantic. Poe was a dreamer; he wrote his little fancy for certainly no more sordid motive than profit. Today's dreamers spoof with "The Spokesman Hoax," with the ignoble design of evading responsibility- nothing more. Gentlemen breakfast, then naturally desire to know what the Chief Executive thinks, for example, about increasing, by Congressional legislation, acreage on Philippine rubber plantations. What do gentlemen read?". . . The Spokesman...