Word: wishfully
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...next Moscow trial, four young people, including Intellectual Alexander Ginzburg, were charged with circulating underground publications. "I love my country," Ginzburg said, "and I do not wish to see its reputation damaged by the latest uncontrolled activities of the KGB." During the five-day trial, sympathizers gathered outside the courtroom. A letter to "world public opinion" condemning the "witch trials" as "a wild mockery of justice no better than the purge trials of the 1930s" was circulated by Mrs. Yuli Daniel and Pavel Litvinov, grandson of Stalin's Foreign Minister and one of the most daring of the dissidents. Shivering...
Says Margaret Mead: "Superstitions reflect the keenness of our wish to have something come true or to prevent something bad from happening. The half acceptance and half denial accorded superstitions give us the best of both worlds...
...second half of the 20th century, the gap be tween wish and denial has often been widened by the very institutions that should provide certainty. Science has bared the mysteries of subatomic particles, and in the process has almost turned into a new metaphysics groping for evidence of things unseen. As organized religion loses its appeal through stuffiness or sterility, people seeking faith increasingly turn to mystical religions, such as Zen and Zoroastrianism...
...potential suicide. After all, his father killed himself. He was obsessed by the "spoliation of nature"-human and mineral-in the once aristocratic Philadelphia suburb where the family lives. Charley, idle and lonely, powerfully infected by his father's preoccupation with decay, conceives a death wish of his own. A neighbor woman, an ancient relic of the town's past, wages a moral and psychological battle to exorcize it, finally succeeds by dying herself. But Charley lives on, haunted by the fear that he had really meant to kill...
...Stern's establishment, the clients come for one day only. With the aid of a scrupulously neutral staff, they are measured and examined. Between bouts of play and sleep, they study their own lives and the world, life wish and death wish together. Then comes calm choice -a return to the world or death, an end reached through a wide range of means provided by the management. Suicides, Stern observes, are the graduate students of the academy...