Until the Seventies subjugation had gone hand in hand with an unprecedented development of the productive forces: "capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural
paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption", wrote Marx (Marx, 1973: 325).
A further question is related to the
paltriness of these very human ambitions--the horse destroyed, the woman sacrificed on a spurious claim--are all presented as essentially silly, time-bound human concerns in the face of the eternal landscape.
There is also the problem of
paltriness of loan-able funds and timeliness, as financial demands are not always met as and at when needed.
The moral anguish over whether or not to sing the Christmas carols in choir; the art-class spent forlornly making sparkling ornaments for the tree you didn't have; the horrible afternoon when a well-meaning teacher thought it might be nice for you to demonstrate for the class just exactly what "Jewish people do for your holiday," a gesture meant to be inclusive, but which only served to highlight your painful sense of difference and the relative
paltriness of your tradition against the glittering, pinecone-trimmed splendor of the Yuletide: these are foreign to him.
are uniformly low, due partly to the absence of characters whose education, experience and character might enable them to expand those horizons." Noting "the sad
paltriness of her world," Marchand wonders if "the limitations of her world have to correlate so closely to the limitations of her art."
He's part of an offense that has scored only 46 points, a number whose
paltriness is surpassed only by the Rams, and they had to fire their coach.
Yet all also despair at the
paltriness of their talent, the arbitrarily immobilizing reduction of nature to the lifeless fixity of a finished work of art.
Denying the notion of sin, Sutter argues that "
paltriness" or lewdness is the besetting problem in American culture, and in a revealing gesture of linguistic and religious displacement, he claims that lewdness has now become "the sacrament of the dispossessed" (292-293).
In the poem beginning "The Love a Life can show Below," she imagines the
paltriness of human love as a filament of "that diviner thing" that nonetheless acts as a valve allowing Paradise to be flung into the poet's consciousness; and in "One crucifixion is recorded--only," she proposes that "Gethsemane--// Is but a Province--in the Being's Centre," an interiority Christ made visible in his own death.
In addition to the class of attack I have answered above, the article contains of 18.25 course an immense amount of personal
paltriness; as, for instance, attributions of my work to this that or the other absurd derivative source; or again, pure nonsense (which can have no real meaning even to the writer) about 'one art 18.30 getting hold of another and imposing on it its conditions and limitations'; or indeed what not besides?
When James Agee wrote in these pages sixty years ago, he often complained of the
paltriness of this or that movie, as judged against the events of the day.
Waythorn was exasperated by his own
paltriness, but the fact of the tie expanded, forced itself on him, became as it were the key to Alice's past.
But it's possible to admire the show's execution -- it's distinctly more stylish, cohesive and clever than "Bat Boy," for starters-- while lamenting the essential
paltriness of the enterprise.
"Proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and
paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
