Even as he is dying, Barbellion allows himself few consolations, dissecting the pretentions of literary London as mercilessly as he describes his own body's gradual ruination ("millions of bacteria are gnawing away at my precious spinal cord").
In his essay "The Way of Ignorance" in the book of the same name (2005), Berry cites example after example of what he refers to as the profound and arrogant ignorance of humankind as we stumble forward toward our own destruction and the ruination of the world in which we live.
Remember, it can be easier to blame an external "something" as being the ruination of your own chance to thrive.
Sexual addiction obviously leads to a loss of intimacy and destroys the family as well as other intimate relationships -and can cause the ruination of one's own life.
He was a willing, witting advocate for a morally loathsome system, and his ideas, put into practice by a later generation of hotheads and fanatics brought on the Civil War and the ruination of Calhoun's own beloved South.
Over the years that I have remained in a 12-step program, I've seen priests, rabbis, combat fighter pilots, cops, championship athletes, entrepreneurs and countless others with strong moral character and unusual courage rendered totally powerless to break their drinking and drug habits on their own -- not even when they faced ruination, insanity, imprisonment and death.
But Haneke keeps us off balance with glimpses of Erika's own vulnerability, and the sense of tragic ruination that her mental turmoil represents.
It echoed the admonition against British messianism voiced more than two centuries ago by Edmund Burke, British statesman and champion of the American Revolution in a futile attempt to forestall the self- ruination of the British Empire: "I dread our own power and our own ambition.
Safire defended much of Nixon's record, but recognized that Nixon might be "the only genuinely tragic hero in our history, his ruination caused by the flaws in his own character".
The instigator of the Second World War, the frustrated watercolorist Adolf Hitler, had aimed both to inflict this on his enemies and to preserve his own Thousand-Year Reich from the possibility of such ruination by ordering all new public buildings to be constructed solely in brick and stone.
