From the first, valedictory line: "Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs", to the touchingly clumsy language – "The culture was the secret sauce" – to the faintly bizarre references to our hero's youthful sporting and academic triumphs (including a bronze medal in a table tennis tournament), the letter carries a note of authentic despair.
Right from the start, the British music press treated the Cure as something of an embarrassment — they were not as political as the Clash, too nice to be the Jam, and their moody despondency did not have the same touch of authentic despair as Joy Division, whose lead singer, Ian Curtis, committed suicide in 1980.
The running battles in the streets are frighteningly authentic, as is the despair of the Jewish community as swastikas are painted on the walls of synagogues.
The events gave rise to conspiracy theories (for example, that the Serb government had organised the protests to topple the Bosnian leadership), but one should safely ignore them since it is clear that, whatever lurks behind, the protesters' despair is authentic.
And as you progress in that direction, you're wondering the whole time if Keats's conclusive despair will feel authentic — if it will engender a heart-sore pang — or seem callow and easy.
At the level of form and intention, however, this very cataloguing of despair about his own authentic goodness is received by the reader as a gift of authentic goodness: we feel the love in the fact of his art, and we love him for it.
An art forger murders his dealer, in an act of existential despair, after failing to create a convincingly "authentic" Antonello da Messina painting, and spends most of the novel agonizing over the murder and his artistic shortcomings.
It was no accident that the poetry of W.H. Auden and his Oxford contemporaries C. Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender became quickly identified as the authentic voice of the new generation, for it matched despair with defiance.
The movie offers a bleak view of isolated people living close to madness; the despair is heavy and unrelenting, but it feels authentic, and, as a sustained mood, it pulls us into the story.
Existentialists have seen Kafka's environment of guilt and despair as the ground upon which to construct an authentic existence.
Unlike those pretenders who play in dark alleys and think they're tough, James Sallis writes from an authentic noir sensibility, a state of mind that hovers between amoral indifference and profound existential despair.
