O'Malley didn't seem to be all that serious ("Ummm, we'll talk about the Euro later," he wrote), but after the trauma of Brexit it was nice for cosmopolitans to have something to sign, some subsidiary act that muted the despair of the main one.
When the resulting book – The Very Model of a Man – had only a muted reception, Jacobson despaired of writing novels, and was seduced into working for television, including a series about comedy (Seriously Funny) and one about Jewishness (Roots Schmoots).
She touched the dark line "Voice of our despair" in "Muted" with deceptive tranquillity, then in "Prison" brought a beautifully underplayed bitterness to the ostensibly peaceful passage "My God, my God, life there is/Simple and serene".
The girl I was, head bowed, tears streaming from her chin, muted by the depth of her despair.
At the end of these novels we may feel stunned, we may feel muted sadness, or even a sense of despair, but we won't feel powerful emotion flooding through us, reminding us of our own vulnerabilities, our own anguish.
For this film, Huston, Morris and Eliot Elisofon devised a style using special filters that – to the initial despair of the staid Technicolor laboratories – created muted, soft tones, a contradiction of everything normally demanded.
It's redeemed by bleak cinematography, muted performances and understated relationships that convey the panic and despair of those early days, but also the rare, heady dawning of fellowship forged in grief.
Kennedy's prose, line by line, is sharp, evocative and often poetic, but the measured precision of her storytelling gives the writing a muted quality, as though it has been benumbed by the characters' despair.
For their part, Identi.ca and FriendFeed proponents have gone from anger to despair to revolutionary fervor to silence as users offer muted reassurance while at the same time wandering "aimlessly" back to Mother Twitter.
There's a look of despair in Olivia's eyes, which is enhanced by the muted tones, and reflects the emotional effects of living in a world that is constantly in flux.
