Cataclysm

“ Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. ”

“ He came into an ending world, on the eve of the great cataclysm which was going to carry away an entire civilization—a tragic turning-point of history, a time troubled and often very grievous, which was hard to live in for all, and to even the most determined minds must have appeared desperate. ”

“ Where sudden overwhelming change is intended, as by revolution, cataclasm is to be preferred to cataclysm, which, though sometimes used to signify such a change, is strictly applied to an overwhelming flood of water, and, specifically, to the Noachian deluge. ”

“ Yet dread men to believe that there awaits The nature of the mighty world a time Of doom and cataclysm, albeit they see So great a bulk of lands to bulge and break! And lest the winds blew back again, no force Could rein things in nor hold from sure career On to disaster. But now because those winds Blow back and forth in alternation strong, And, so to say, rallying charge again, And then repulsed retreat, on this account Earth oftener threatens than she brings to pass Collapses dire. For to one side she leans, Then back she sways ”

“ The minds of many men, witnessing this double ruin by flame and earthquake, are at such times filled with consternation: to them it seems that nothing will survive, that beyond these cataclysms there will never again be stability and peace—a new and better age, safer footing, wider horizons, clearer skies. ”

“ It has been held by many geologists that numerous catastrophes or cataclysms antedated the existence of man. In literature, the final event of a drama is the catastrophe, or denouement. Misfortune ordinarily suggests less of suddenness and violence than calamity or disaster, and is especially applied to that which is lingering or enduring in its effects. ”

“ Changes are frequently violent, sudden, tremendous in their immediate effect. They move rapidly and involve many complexes, but progress is a slow-going old tortoise that plods along irrespective of storm or sunshine, life or death, of the cataclysms of war or the catastrophes of earthquakes or volcanoes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In this world of ours, the more stupendous the events, the more abysmal the catastrophes, the more do men realize their own impotence and the more eagerly do they look for the Hidden Hand that is powerful enough to bring about such events and to hurl upon them such devastating cataclysms. ”

“ Terrible as it all is, it is yet beautiful while it lasts: the red sibilant flames, the fierce glare on the sky, the beaters beating it down on its leeward edge with branches of pine-trees, and silhouetted in black against the bright glow of the fire, all unite to make up a weird and intensely impressive picture. But to the beasts and birds whose home is on the moor, it is a cataclysm inexpressible, appalling, unthinkable. ”

“ Had he been informed by an indisputable authority that the end of the world was to be finally accomplished by a catastrophic disturbance of the atmosphere, he would have assimilated the information under the simple idea of dirty weather, and no other, because he had no experience of cataclysms, and belief does not necessarily imply comprehension. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Once drawn within the down-draught of that hideous vortex, a whole army might be destroyed more certainly than even by the manifold death-dealing contrivances of modern science, a whole legislature lost in a single hour of ghastly and unhonoured catastrophe!
Oh, the sickening sweep of that descent! With what sensations of awe, horror, and strange, distraught admiration, must a doomed victim, once within that whirl, gaze about him!—for he has leisure to observe. The downward draught of those swift, wide-sweeping, spirally-whirling water-walls is comparatively slow. ”

“ Over them, we find the wrecks of a former world—once as beautiful, as thickly peopled, but more thoughtless and more wicked than the present, which was hurled into one general chaos, and its component, but incongruous parts, amalgamated in awful mockery by the deluge—that tremendous evidence of the wrath of Heaven. ”

“ If all the evils and calamities that have ever happened since the World began, could be gathered in one great Catastrophe, its horrors could not eclipse, in their frightful proportions, the Drama that impends over us. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the other hand, the advocates of catastrophism, to make good their views, are compelled to invoke forces and actions, both destructive and restorative, of which we have, and can have, no direct knowledge. They endow the whirlwind and the earthquake, the central fire and the rain from heaven, with powers as mighty as ever imagined in fable, and they build up the fragments of a repeatedly shattered world by the intervention of an intermittently active creative power. ”

“ The parts are all so quietly performed, the catastrophe is so clearly before everybody’s eyes and understanding, that it more resembles a dramatic representation than a mighty event in real life, big perhaps with incalculable consequences. ”

“ If even our less sensitive hearts may be wrung with emotion at the tidings of some mournful catastrophe that occupies, after all, but some passing hour in the world’s history, but which has carried death and lamentation into many households—the sudden pestilence that has swept down its thousands—the gallant vessel that was a moment before spreading proudly its white wings to the gale, the joyous hearts on board dreaming of hearth and home, and the “many ports that would exult in the gleam of her mast”—the next! ”

“ Die, die, die, die, death comes to all." Destruction faces us wherever we turn. Destruction below and above, destruction behind and before. Change is the only Eternal,—why not as welcome Death as Life? ”

“ Earth with thy folds, and hollows and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down! In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips! ”

“ You will recall more clearly than I certain horrible, catastrophic, universal-ruin passages in Revelation—monsters swallowing the universe, blood and fire and clouds and an eternal crash, rolling ruin enveloping all things—well, all that's come. There are, perhaps, ten million men dead of this war and, perhaps, one hundred million persons to whom death would be a blessing. ”

“ The catastrophe is not only unique in history, but all the more notable for having befallen, not a single state overrun by powerful barbarians, but a half of the world; and for having been effected by a seemingly trivial agency that sprang from the civilization itself. ”

“ Do the stars know of us? will the lost, the nameless one after eternity find himself once more in his, by himself accursed creation, and will he not then send forth, epidemics, pestilences, famines, fiery flames, and floods of waters, together with earth-quakes and a thousand all-powerful deaths on white horses, in order to crush this his brood, to grind, to powder into nothing, who scandalously imagine that the sparks of his spirit dwell in them. ”

“ What has hitherto seemed to us floating jetsom and blind wreckage, what has hitherto seemed to us mere brutal lumps of primeval clay tossed to and fro by the giant hands of chaos, what has hitherto seemed to us slabs of inhuman chemistry, suddenly assumes under the pressure of this great power out of the abyss a strange and lovely and terrible expressiveness. ”

“ Its fall may startle the world with its shock; the fragments may strew the earth in a wreck as gigantic as were its proportions when it drew the gaze of admiring or trembling nations: but they are but the more striking proofs of the destruction that has overtaken it;—it is a ruin still. ”

“ I have a premonition of disaster which, though it is no doubt perfectly natural at my age with the last catastrophe almost upon me, seems to be of a penultimate nature, a final human crisis. All that I have heard from Butler about this young man, this colleague of his, disposes me to fear him. ”

“ It is among such extra-social or “stimuli” factors that catastrophe falls as a precipitating agent in social change.
The significance of crisis in social change likewise requires attention, and it will be clarifying to our thought at this point to distinguish carefully between crisis and catastrophe, and to inquire what the nature of the former really is. The word “crisis” is of Greek origin, meaning a point of culmination and separation, an instant when change one way or another is impending. Crises are those critical moments which are, as we say, big with destiny. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Conclusion Recapitulation—The various steps in the study presented in propositional form—The rôle of catastrophe direct and indirect. (a) Directly prepares the ground-work for change by: (1) weakening social immobility; (2) producing fluidity of custom; (3) enhancing environal favorability for change— (b) Indirectly sets in motion factors determining the nature of the change such as: (1) the release of spirit and morale; (2) the play of imitation; (3) the stimulus of leaders and lookers-on; (4) the socialization of institutions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the midst of this destruction of one-fourth of mankind, martyred Saints will ask the Lord to hasten the work of human destruction. An earthquake, and the lapse of stars from heaven, then begin to destroy the frail tenure of human hope; and even the great men, and mighty and chief captains become desperate, like the most effeminate and pusillanimous. Every successive plague is increasingly awful and unendurable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even the elements when out of order can do but little toward perfecting destruction. A deluge is wanted—or that crash of doom which, whether it is to come or not, is believed by the world to be very distant. ”

“ How insistently did He foreshadow the impending chaos, the approaching upheavals, the universal conflagration which, in the concluding years of His life, had only begun to reveal the measure of its force and the significance of its impact on human society?
A co-sharer in the woeful trials and momentary frustrations afflicting the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh; reaping a harvest in His lifetime wholly incommensurate to the sublime, the incessant and strenuous efforts He had exerted; experiencing the initial perturbations of the world-shaking catastrophe in store for an unbelieving humanity ”