Sometimes the novel sags under the weight of this obligation.
So I felt the tremendous weight of that obligation when I got the remarkable phone call inviting me to attend the State of the Union as a distinguished guest of the First Lady.
Altruism is frequently cited by researchers and parents as a motivation for consenting to paediatric trials, but the weight of the obligation to protect one's child means it is unlikely that it is an overwhelming consideration when parents are deliberating whether to enter their child in a trial.
Some of them subsequently collapsed under the weight of their obligations.
Medicare, as well as any company rash enough to have offered pensions, may eventually sink under the weight of its obligations to the elderly.
According to most defenders of special obligations, such obligations are prima facie obligations, i.e., they are obligations with a certain weight that can be counterbalanced by the weight of other special obligations or of other types of obligations.
But most of the characters struggle under the weight of other people's desires — obligations that turn out also to be secondhand.
The same publisher has restored to print Sheed's novel Max Jamison ($18.95), which explores the plight of a successful but burned-out theater critic groaning under the weight of his personal and professional obligations.
So a central issue here is that of conflicting obligations of different weight and the defeasability of obligations.
People aren't trapped inside something handed down to them with the heavy weight of generations--but nor do they necessarily feel the positive pull of obligation to steward the cultural and spiritual treasures of that legacy.
