Still, modernising India and China have become sources of existential and ideological self-affirmation for western elites, who tend to ignore anything that challenges their articles of faith - free markets and democracy - or suggests an arduous complexity.
The Suffolk coast becomes a landscape of existential emptiness.
If the tremolo in the double basses of the original "Das Lied" evokes the trembling of the earth as it is about to renew itself, the same note, played on a solo bass, becomes the existential shiver of one man.
So if this new novel is good enough, it may serve to underline how hard it is to write a novel today and how journalism when it becomes an existential species of non-fiction can generally be superior to the novel, superior even on metaphysical grounds — but this last I don't dare go near.
Mr. Jarrett, 68, became a kind of existential hero to many of his admirers with the 1975 solo album "The Köln Concert," a foundational text for both his career and for ECM, the German label that soon became his exclusive outlet.
With xenophobia on the rise across the continent and hard-right, anti-immigration parties either in government or riding high in the polls in countries as diverse as Italy, Hungary, Germany, Poland, Austria and Sweden, immigration has become an issue of existential importance for the bloc.
In adulthood, guys are pretty much expected to latch onto other distracted forms of masculine bonhomie that might even continue post-marriage – promiscuity and boozy bromances have become a sort of existential spirit journey for young men (see: The Hangover, Old School).
As it has become ingrained that one of the main forms of shared public life is shopping, its loss becomes an existential threat to society.
In that context, the idea that America should reject ties with necessarily less blessed nations becomes existential, an exceptionalism of another order altogether.
