It is only fair to note that unmingled wretchedness is, like beauty, in the eye and ear of the beholder.
The pre-election leaders' debate is the same absurdist drama of unmeaning, an immobile ballet of wretchedness in which the three (or two, or seven) politicians have an inert, waxy hopeless quality, with a flash of existential panic in the eyes.
The poet and colonist Edmund Spenser wrote that the victims "were brought to such wretchedness as that any stony heart would have rued the same".
Oh, the sacred misery of it all, the authoritarian wretchedness, the rocking to and fro - like disturbed children, the head-banging and the wailing.
In the same interview, he claimed that disease was not only physically debilitating but psychologically degrading: "physical wretchedness has done its worse on the human sufferer, for it has destroyed his mind... [it] annihilates the mental faculties the faculties distinctive of the human being".
And her books do the same: her quirky romantic comedies spring from emotions that are actually quite shocking in their violence and wretchedness.
And of course, celebrities endure the same unhinging feelings as the rest of us: rage and shame and envy and jealousy and lust and wretchedness and regret and tenderness and love.
Underlying mood: despair at the wretchedness of the Arab condition.
