Word: stoicism
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...Made It. In their less glamorous, but physically more demanding roles aboard Gemini 7, Frank Borman and James Lovell demonstrated a neat combination of endurance, stoicism and humor that was vital to their mission's success. Like Schirra, Borman, 37, was air-oriented from youth, building model airplanes and later selling newspapers to pay for flying lessons. He ranked eighth in his graduating class at West Point before he joined the Air Force. Then an eardrum broken during a practice dive-bombing run made him doubt that he would ever fly again. He was delighted when recovery proved...
...subtler conflict enmeshes Pizarro and Atahuallpa. The existential hero of nothingness encounters the Rousseauistic myth of the innocent child of nature, the noblest savage of them all. David Carradine plays the Inca with marmoreal stoicism, and Shaffer gives him a primitive sign-and-grunt language that sometimes reduces the son of the sun to the son of Tondeleyo. The cynic in Pizarro becomes enthralled by the savior in Atahuallpa, who has a shining conviction that his godhead will raise him from the dead. Pizarro dreads but courts the great Inca's murder. If Atahuallpa is resurrected, might not Christ...
...ordered him to commit suicide. At least Nero recognized greatness; ordinary mortals died by torture when a shadow crossed the Emperor's demented brain. In this threadbare, novelistic pastiche, Vincent Sheean treats Seneca far worse. Though the historical Seneca was second only to Cicero as an exponent of Stoicism, Sheean's Seneca has only windy self-pity and a maundering facility with cosmic clichés ("In my opinion the wickedest and unworthiest of men are generally the most rewarded"). He shows little understanding of his venomous pupil, perhaps because Sheean's Nero is not a character...
Nazemann, as a result of a traumatic stay in a Nazi concentration camp, has been trying for twenty years to escape from his own emotions. But the necessity of interacting with other people in the city will not permit him his stoicism, and eventually he is forced to work through his traumatic past in the manner of a psychoanalysis and return to his human responsibilities...
...damned women! No, not really, because Mozart was really worried about his wife while he was writing this opera (some say she was the biggest attraction for visiting firemen in Baden toward the end of the eighteenth century) but Mozart loved her. So the troupe with a wonderfully contagious stoicism, sings, "Happy is the man who takes everything as it comes...