Calamity

“ The calamity which strikes us all, more or less, is indeed tremendous! But its aspect above all has something so dreadfully threatening, to fill even the coldest and most courageous, with a sense of apprehension and awe. ”

“ Ten years of unceasing turmoil, so laden with anguish, so fraught with incalculable consequences to the future of civilization, have brought the world to the verge of a calamity too awful to contemplate. ”

“ In a foreign climate, being unknown, I might, with some probability of success, endeavor to conceal my unhappy calamity—a calamity calculated, even more than beggary, to estrange the affections of the multitude, and to draw down upon the wretch the well-merited indignation of the virtuous and the happy. ”

“ After braving in silence the storms of perhaps a dozen or twenty centuries, they seem in this, their last calamity, to become somewhat communicative, making sign of a very unwilling acceptance of their fate, holding themselves well up from the ground on knees and elbows, seemingly ill at ease, and anxious, like stubborn wrestlers, to rise again. ”

“ But so full is the world of calamity, that every source of pleasure is polluted, and every retirement of tranquillity disturbed. When time has supplied us with events sufficient to employ our thoughts, it has mingled them with so many disasters, that we shrink from their remembrance, dread their intrusion upon our minds, and fly from them as from enemies that pursue us with torture. ”

“ It was a fitting prelude to the great calamity that has followed, with its frightful toll by dead mechanical means of the lives of living, loving men; though no one single life so precious, so ill to be spared, has been taken again.... ”

“ Every man who, within thirty years, had put up a wooden house in a city whose familiar breezes were gales, and whose gales were hurricanes, solicited that rain of fire. They who, hasting to be rich, fell into the snare of cheap and dangerous building, digged, every man, a pit for his neighbor's feet as well as for his own. The scrutable aspect of the calamity was that it had not come years before. ”

“ Never in history has so great a calamity descended so suddenly upon the Human Family, unless we except the earthquake toppling down cities and submerging a whole coast in a single night. But how small all that has ensued from any such convulsion, compared with the desolation and destruction already produced by this war! ”

“ The present calamity must bring the country to its sober senses and make us see the positive necessity—the inevitable MUST—of taking immediate and adequate measures to guard against the repetition of such a disaster. "Strike while the iron is hot," has been the battle-cry of men of action throughout the world! ”

“ Crises often, perhaps most often, precede catastrophies, as when revolutions break. The alternate truth that the catastrophies themselves are re-agents to generate the crisis-situation has not been so commonly noted. Nevertheless the disintegration of the normal by shock and calamity is an increasingly familiar spectacle. ”

“ The calamity, if unaccompanied by severe loss of life, must have been only, in general, an exciting adventure. But what retreat, what consolation is there for the hordes of poor artizans, who, by some commercial accident, arising, perhaps, from the imprudence of a few merchants, or some political or warlike movement, are deprived of the customary weekly pittance? ”

“ The only other calamity at all equalling it, or surpassing it, was the Civil War, and that was the work of the evil passions of man inciting him to slay his brother, while Nature would have had him live in peace. ”

“ One of the best instances of Wreathing is in the combination of the three phrases
succour all that are in danger, help all that are in necessity, comfort all that are in tribulation.
Danger, Necessity, and Tribulation are in progressive order of calamity. In danger, the calamity may be avoided—we want support for our own strength: in necessity, the blow has fallen—we want help at once from outside: in tribulation, the disaster has come—we want comfort.
If we have understood Progressive Duplication, we shall at once see that Wreathing is used in unison with it. ”

“ A place may have its factions that quarrel and fight among themselves, but let a great calamity come upon the land, flood, famine, pestilence, and these little personal differences are entirely forgotten and all work shoulder to shoulder in the one great cause. The changing, the evolving self gives rise to quarrels ”

“ Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint; ”

“ And, re-assembling our afflicted powers, Consult how we may henceforth most offend Our enemy, our own loss how repair, How overcome this dire calamity, What reinforcement we may gain from hope, If not, what resolution from despair." ”

“ Our own belief is that each calamity brings the minds of the nation into closer sympathy and hastens the day when all men will understand that the society they have builded is guilty of causing miseries just as great as those we are now witnessing, the defying the laws of nature because of indifference and greed. ”

“ There are few states, I suppose, which exact so severe a toll from one's nervous system as the ANTICIPATION of calamity. ”

“ Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm. ”

“ When timely rain fails or famine stalks through the land, turning his eyes from the natural causes, the orthodox Hindû will say that such a king is now reigning over them unjustly, and hence the calamity.—Translator. ”

“ The appalling calamity fell upon the people of our country with crushing force, and for a brief time an intense excitement prevailed, which in a community less just and self-controlled than ours might have led to hasty acts of blind resentment. ”

“ Calamity sets free such a flow of creative power that destruction itself makes for progress. These disasters concentrate upon constructive enterprise stories of emotional energy that in other times are expended in the fierce struggle of competitive existence. ”

“ It shows how intimately every individual was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode. It gives the inexperienced stranger a better idea of what a vast and comprehensive calamity invasion is than he can ever get by reading books at the fireside. ”

“ What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent.” ”

“ Calamity's Compensations.—The compensations of calamity are apparent in some of the mightiest events that history chronicles. The Fall of Man, though it brought death into the world, proved the means of peopling a planet in accordance with the Creator's design. ”

“ and that in the condition of men it frequently happens, that grief and anxiety lie hid under the golden robes of prosperity, and the gloom of calamity is cheered by secret radiations of hope and comfort; as in the works of nature the bog is sometimes covered with flowers, and the mine concealed in the barren crags. ”

“ "Every trail has its end, and every calamity brings its lesson!" ”

“ Public calamity is a mighty leveller; ”

“ Thou hast gained, and wield'st a power, to which The rulers of the elements do bow; The hurricane, at thy command goes forth, Walking where'er thou bid'st it, and the storm Ceases to howl when thou hast said,—"Be still!" Thine anger stirs the ocean, and thy wrath Finds out the deep foundations of the mountains, And shakes them with its strength; the subtle fire, That lights the tempest on its gloomy way, Starts from its cloud-rocked slumber, at thy call, To be thy messenger. Canst thou not be content when thou art feared By those who rule a world? ”

“ The storm of conflict raged from dawn to late in the afternoon, with unabating fury. Men on both sides seemed immune to fatigue or fear, and for fourteen hours, as if endued with supernatural energy and power, struggled amidst dust, smoke, starvation and wounds and death with unflagging fury, in the maddening work of ruin and destruction. ”

“ Every one has known, at one time or another in life, that strange unexpected calm that always falls like sudden snow on a storm-tossed country, after some great crisis or upheaval. The blow has seemed so catastrophic that the world must be changed with the force of its fall-- but the world is not changed ”

“ The clamor oppressed the spirit, the dust fretted the nostrils and blinded the eyes, the sweltering heat baked and exhausted the body, and everything-buildings, men, pavement—seemed strained, breaking, ready to burst, losing patience, on the verge of exploding into some immense catastrophe, some outbreak, after which one would be able to breathe freely and easily in the air refreshed by it. ”

“ Why should I speak of tempests, various and uncertain, wherein the attack upon all things is tossed about without any order or discrimination?—in shipwrecks, that the fates of good and bad men are jumbled together, their deserts confounded?—in conflagrations, that the destruction of innocent and guilty is united?—and when with the plague-taint of the sky a region is stained, that all perish without distinction?—and when the heat of war is raging, that it is the better men who generally fall? ”

“ Poor Humanity, crazed with fear, was fleeing in all directions on hearing the thundering pace of the Plague, War, Hunger and Death. Men and women, young and old, were knocking each other down and falling to the ground overwhelmed by terror, astonishment and desperation. ”

“ In fury-cyclones, is he borne along,
For all his mouthings, to the shoals of doom.
Ah, so irrevocably some hidden power
Betramples forevermore affairs of men,
And visibly grindeth with its heel in mire
The lictors' glorious rods and axes dire,
Having them in derision! Again, when earth
From end to end is rocking under foot,
And shaken cities ruin down, or threaten
Upon the verge, what wonder is it then
That mortal generations abase themselves,
And unto gods in all affairs of earth
Assign as last resort almighty powers
And wondrous energies to govern all? ”

“ It is not until a great crisis is past that one comprehends with any clearness of vision the multitudinous events that whirl about the one supreme fact. Stunned by the first shock, one wakes to learn that close on the heels of disaster come the consequences—pell-mell, helter-skelter, pushing, crowding with a grim insistence from which there is no escape. ”

“ With the pale shadow of doom upon them,
How shall they foil the dread foe?
Often, when life and its cares seem darkest,
Doth aid and guidance appear,
And the storm and the threatened danger
On the horizon disappear. ”

“ Here in the Fog Babylon, amid mud and smoke, in the infinite din of 'vociferous platitude,' and quack outbellowing quack, with truth and pity on all hands ground under the wheels, can one call it a home, or a world? It is a waste chaos, where we have to swim painfully for our life. ”

“ From time to time there pass on that surface, like squalls over the water, catastrophes,—a war, a pestilence, a royal favourite, a famine. That causes a disturbance which lasts a short time, the depth of sorrow being immovable as the depth of the ocean. ”

“ The misery of others, like a tempestuous night, added to the pleasures of your own security. You even enjoyed the storm, by contemplating the difference of conditions, and that which carried sorrow into the breasts of thousands served but to heighten in you a species of tranquil pride. ”

“ I have a feeling that we are flung into the midst of a great tragedy which has continued for years, for centuries, and in which we have begun to play our parts only at the moment of the crisis, at the moment of the terrific cataclysm prepared by generations of men. ”

“ The catastrophe seems almost symbolic of the disasters that ever and anon befall the devoted Republic, which from time to time rises phoenix-like from its own ashes, and after having vainly fluttered its wings for a flight into the empyrean, falls back to earth with broken pinion. ”

“ Mighty empires have crashed in ruin to the ground, diseases have unpeopled half the globe, there have been vast natural cataclysms in which thousands have been overwhelmed by flood and fire and whirlwind. ”

“ They looked forward confidently to another such catastrophe, to take place like the preceding, at the close of a cycle, when the sun was to be effaced from the heavens, the human race from the earth, and when the darkness of chaos was to settle on the habitable globe. ”

“ Disaster would befall the nation—death, perhaps, the individual.” “A feaster unable to do his full part, might, if he could, hire another to aid him; otherwise he must remain in his place till the work was done.” ”

“ The two additional propositions suggested in the Introduction, namely, that the degree of fluidity seems to vary directly as the shock of the catastrophe, and that brusk revolution in the conditions of life accomplish not sudden, but gradual changes in society, require a study of comparative catastrophic phenomena for verification or rejection. ”