Word: torpor
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...metaphor is not the meaning. What emerges subliminally from The Contractor is that life runs the inevitable course of the rising and setting of the sun, that it moves with deceptive torpor yet is shatteringly brief, and that the sum of all its tediously accumulated fractions is a melancholy zero...
...Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there...
Despite his public image of lounge-lizard torpor, he doted on work. This accounts for his staggering creative output: he composed the music and lyrics for 281 songs, wrote 27 plays, a novel, five books of short stories and two volumes of autobiography. Amazingly, he could not read music. He hummed and whistled his tunes, and then played them by ear. One group of numbers is misty-eyed romantic, starlight-in-champagne (I'll Follow My Secret Heart, Zigeuner, Someday I'll Find You). The other group pinches a satiric nerve with droll spoofery (Mad Dogs and Englishmen...
Strife. In his oratory, Gaddafi often betrays a sort of messianic despair. "The Arabs are engulfed in torpor and darkness," he told his people last year. "The Arabs have lost direction." What he might better have said is that the so-called "Arab nation"-that congeries of 24 republics, monarchies, sheikdoms and otherwise organized anomalies-is, as usual, in a state of fratricidal strife...
...heavy users, say the doctors in the Archives of General Psychiatry, were in a "chronic intoxicated state marked by apathy and lethargy," that kept them from functioning in their normal jobs. They apparently felt no impulse toward violence or mayhem. In fact the drug induced a condition of general torpor. Another group of 115 heavy users had severe psychotic (schizophrenic) reactions; of them, only three had stuck to hash exclusively, while 112 sought to enhance their highs with multiple drugs-hashish plus alcohol, LSD (acid) or amphetamines...