This may indeed offer an opportunity to prevent increasing anguish if the end of life is drawn out and give the family a better chance to cherish the last moments with their dying child.
Likewise, loss aversion prompts many investors to hold onto losers in the hope that they will bounce back and prevent them from suffering the anguish of realizing loss.
In the middle of January, when it became clear that the ill-conceived legislation to prevent piracy was going nowhere, his anguish and anger squirted out in 140-character bursts, day after day, leaving little doubt about whose ox was being gored.
Various forms of guilt are quite common, such as that arising from (a) the belief that one contributed to the suicidal person's anguish, or (b) the failure to recognize that anguish, or (c) the inability to prevent the suicidal act itself.
"If you're an American who wants to do something to prevent more families from knowing the immeasurable anguish that these families here have known, then we have to act," Mr. Obama said.
The shy Taiwanese teenagers caught in a romantic triangle in Chih-Yen Yee's tender wisp of a film "Blue Gate Crossing" may be naïve and virginal, but their innocence doesn't prevent them from succumbing to acute romantic anguish.
The great 20th century activist, philosopher and teacher, Rabbi Joshua Heschel, another modern day prophet, asked us these questions: "Daily we should take account and ask what have today to alleviate the anguish, to mitigate the evil, to prevent humiliation?
Quagmire, along with his neighbors, Peter and Joe, seek to relieve Brenda from her anguish, and soon decide to murder him, in order to prevent her from being harmed any further.
The other offering, the Cuban one, "Despedida" ("Farewell"), was enlivened by Arturo O'Farrill's eight-member Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble, but even O'Farrill's bongos and brass could not prevent you from noticing that this piece epitomized the old idea of modern dance as energized anguish.
It obscures the reality of the past, the uglier truths of the dream factory — including the institutional racism that prevented black performers from suffering the same rarefied anguish as Tyrone Power — and blinds us to cinema's present.
