Word: soulfully
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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JAMES FORRESTAL, by Arnold A. Rogow. Except for some weirdly psychoanalytical conclusions, this is a careful biography of the U.S.'s first Secretary of Defense, a brilliant, mercurial man whose drive and ambition were limitless but whose Irish soul floundered in despond...
Full Stocking. France's monumental diplomatist of the 19th century was Talleyrand, who, said Mirabeau, would sell his soul for money, "and he would be right, for he would be exchanging dung for gold." Where Richelieu spoke for a powerful and united France, Talleyrand's 19th century role was most often like De Gaulle's: to make the world pay heed to a beaten, broken France. Superbly confident, cool under the worst conditions, Talleyrand once sat calmly through an hour-long tirade by Napoleon Bonaparte and heard himself called everything from a liar and a traitor...
...Bullfights. Fados sound like torch songs sung from the top of a mosque: sobs, wails, cries from the soul. Even when performed by as dulcet a fadista as Amália, they are more forlorn than a foghorn, more despairing than a moan. Fado means destiny in Portuguese, and the Weltschmerz of a good fado gets a physical grip on its audience; like "ffillie Holiday's blues, fados encourage a state of mind well beyond the reach of popular music...
...welder, an ordinary workingman: doomed to his job, tied to his home town. Sicily seems to him an inhospitable place. The company hotel looks like a concrete waffle. The nearest town is huts and ruts. The local night life is limited to a single soda fountain of soul-searing fluorescence. After three weeks in this hell, the miserable welder imagines home as heaven and his fiancée (Anna Canzi) as an angel. When she sends him a letter, he greets it like an annunciation. Eagerly he replies, and soon the fiancés are writing regularly, soon...
...away when his wife was held up by a gunman. The night Forrestal jumped to his death, he left a book open to a passage from Sophocles' Ajax: Better to die, and sleep The never-waking sleep, than linger on And dare to live when the soul's life is gone...