Instead of a crazed Brooksian farce about life on the bottom rung, Life Stinks turns out to be a surprisingly low-key Chaplinesque fable.

There are the apparently outmoded calls for privileges for the industrial proletariat as the "more concentrated, united and educated section of the toiling masses, hardened in battle”; the replacing of antiquated methods of housekeeping by housecommunes, public kitchens, etc ...

Enela cleared their way through the throng, speaking in Tonga, a heavy language that freighted the air with ceremony.

And Benjamin's theory of Ideas indicates the character of ideal touchedness.