Word: stoically
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Ulysses Grant eventually receded to become a haunting half mystery of American life. Down the generations he has stayed cocooned, in memory, in a stoical mediocrity. H.L. Mencken said Grant was the kind of man who would say to someone he encountered, "Meet the wife." He possessed an eerie philistine equilibrium, remarking once that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained. What stuck mostly in memory as the decades passed were the shabby things: the scandals and swindles and, ignominiously, the talk about his drinking. He did drink too much now and then, when he was depressed...
...innards to help sustain his chickens. He also enjoys some well-placed influence: since his late father was said to be friendly with Jaruzelski, Karczmarczyk has managed to wheedle more feed out of the government than most of his colleagues do. He can therefore afford to be relatively stoical. His wife may think of Reagan as a "chicken killer," but the farmer maintains that "Reagan has taught us to think. For years we allowed ourselves to depend on the West to feed ourselves...
More "advanced" societies have forgotten the demonic language of superstition and luck, which they are inclined to call "dumb" or "blind." They often have no better explanation than primitives do for luck's strange intercessions, but they generally adopt a strategy both passive and fatalistic, a stoical mixture of rationalism and resignation to luck's works. Today it is mainly gamblers who stay on intimate and dangerous terms with luck and try to tame and possess it. Here and there, state lotteries have tried to bureaucratize luck-a dreary business and a contradiction in terms...
...January, the collective leadership that Tito put in place has been functioning smoothly and appears to be proving itself capable of running the country without him. Among ordinary Yugoslavs today, concern persists, but the tension of the first days of Tito's final illness has given way to stoical acceptance. Said Jože Smole, Tito's former personal secretary and member of the Central Committee of the League of Communists: "We have very deep emotional ties with Tito, who is the symbol of Yugoslavia. But we do not expect something that will go against...
...housewives and bearded village elders disembarked from rickety country buses and surged through a choking cloud of incense past the dozen black-draped altars. There, Buddhist priests murmured their sutras while mourners prostrated themselves in grief. With a shrug, a government worker whispered the prevailing mood of sorrowful but stoical resignation: "Gone is gone...