Their lives are simple, austere, even bleak, while their relations with one another are sensitive and complex, bound together by need and dependency and, in the case of Betty and Harry, desire.
But austerity seems much less austere if you are old.
The warmth of a house, austere and quiet on a cold night, in relation to the men who are running from their own deeds.
Mr Towler said the absence of a national (youth) strategy feeds the absence in local plans in relations to youth work especially in "austere times".
Lennon, whose last book was The Funnies, is up to something different here: an austere meditation on physical labor, endurance, and the consolations if any of art in relation to such a life.
In his memoir "My Reminiscences," Tagore remembers his father, known as Maharshi ("great sage"), as a distant and austere figure: "He had a well-defined code to regulate his relations with others and theirs with him.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last month that the planned maneuvers with Israel, dubbed Austere Challenge, will be "the largest joint exercise in the history" of U.S.-Israeli relations.
"A war generation," he writes, "with its imperial ambitions and austere Islamism, has come to power and is redefining the parameters of Iran's international relations and pressing its newfound advantages to their limits".
This seems a rather austere picture of human life, and an egocentric one, to boot, for nothing is said about relations between human beings, beyond Socrates' exhortations that his friends should likewise take care of their souls as best they can.
