Catastrophism

“ I think of the great disaster; of the hours of terror and despair known by millions of people. I think of the thousands and thousands of men, women and children trapped in subways and theaters, trampled to death, butchered, murdered. I visualize the hospitals full of the sick and the dying, the giant liners of the air and of the ocean crashing, colliding, going down into the sea; and I seem to hear the screams and the pitiful prayers for help of the maddened passengers. Tell me, what fate should befall the fiend who would loose such woe and misery on an unsuspecting world? ”

“ The city quivers in the throes of fierce, successive quakes, And massive structures thrill like giant oaks before the blast; Into the streets with deafening crash the frailer ones are cast. Half garbed, the multitude rush out in frantic haste, with prayer and shout, To join the panic stricken rout. Ho! DEATH is marching past. A rumbling noise! The streets upheave, and sink again, like waves; And shattered piles and shapeless wrecks are strewn with human graves. Danger at every corner lurks. Destruction fills the air. Death-laden showers of mortar, bricks, are falling everywhere. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Nothing can describe the appalling crash of the storm wind, rain and thunder in one moment, the roar of the furious sea, the swaying of the ground, the shrieks of the people, who thought death here at every instant. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is an air of fatality about such an incident which reminds one of the revolting accumulation of calamity which renders fire after an earthquake or a railway accident so horrible; or, I may add, a conflagration in an American forest or prairie or on a Russian steppe. We are given to understand—and we scarcely need to be told it—that there is a feeling of despair, a sensation of being hunted by fate, in such circumstances which is, of all human experiences, the most terrible. ”

“ The world, though stunned by its magnitude, was yet to learn that no pen could describe the horrors of a disaster unparalleled in modern history, and that only those who saw the scene of devastation soon after the catastrophe have any realization of its terrible results. ”

“ The night with every passing moment seemed yawning wider and wider before him in a chasm that threatened ruin, and disaster, and the wreckage of everything that in life was worth the living, and—no,’ Not yet! ”

“ 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 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 the effect of a misunderstanding or a quarrel were immediate, with what rapidity would not the tragedies of the world develop! With what certitude could one not foresee, and perhaps provide against, the climax of an evil fortune. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I might boast that, during all this scene of horror, not a sigh or expression of fear escaped me, had not my support been founded in that miserable, though strong, consolation that all mankind were involved in the same calamity, and that I imagined I was perishing with the world itself! ”

“ Sound like spirits that watch for the dying groan.
The storm-fiend sweeps o'er the starless waste,
And the unchained blasts to the gathering haste;
Man alone, unshaken, his course retains,
While the elements combat and chaos reigns. ”

“ The whack of heavy falling bodies, the sudden shivering splinter of chopped logs, the crystal shatter of pounded ice, the crash of a tree hurled to the earth by a hurricane, the irrational, persistent chaos of noise made by switching freight-trains, the explosion of gas, the blasting of stone, and the terrific grinding of rock upon rock which precedes the collapse—all these have been in my touch-experience, and contribute to my idea of Bedlam, of a battle, a waterspout, an earthquake, and other enormous accumulations of sound. ”

“ Torn, ragged, desolate, choked with sand and debris, preserving a faint life amid the desolation, all seems so unlike the once smiling valley. So unlike and yet the same, the same fields, the same trees, the same vigorous life, only for the moment obscured by the sudden catastrophe. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I deplore, as a citizen of that world, the general devastation, the blood that has been shed in the field or on the scaffold, and the stupendous destruction that has overwhelmed a great nation.—While I can yet contemplate the minuti to feel the distresses of many amiable individuals—from these may you, my dear friend, have now escaped ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is like seeking the dead and wounded on the battlefield, or the missing, the maimed or the dead after an earthquake, or some devouring tempest or flood—so much alike, at least in their results, are the eruptions of the elements and the fierce, uncontrolled passions of man. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Among the flights of fancy in which the Fifth Form were forced to indulge were a railway collision, a fire, a bicycle accident, an escape of gas, the swallowing of poison, the bursting of the kitchen boiler, a case of choking, and an infectious epidemic. On the whole they rather enjoyed the fun of airing their views, and when asked to propose fresh topics had suggested such startling catastrophes as “A German Invasion,” “A Revolution,” “A Volcanic Eruption,” “A Famine,” and “A Zeppelin Raid.” ”

“ Brooding over their pains and aches has magnified them so that they overshadow all things else in the universe. An earthquake and fire that destroy a great city are of less importance to them than the recital of their own woes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And such the storm of battle on this day, And such the frenzy, whose convulsion blinds To all save carnage, that, beneath the fray, An earthquake reeled unheededly away! None felt stern Nature rocking at his feet, And yawning forth a grave for those who lay Upon their bucklers for a winding-sheet; Such is the absorbing hate when warring nations meet. ”

“ In the presence of a catastrophe, so vast that the imagination reeled as the eye wandered over the mighty paths where the cyclones of fire had swept, social inequalities and race prejudices were ignored. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Ingenious and masterful as the human intellect is in guiding and controlling the ordinary forces of nature, how impotent and insignificant it appears in the presence of such a transcendent disaster! It is well nigh inconceivable that a great section throbbing with populous towns, and resonant with the hum of industry, [Pg 112] should be wiped out in the twinkling of an eye by a mighty, raging torrent, more consuming than fire and more violent than the earthquake. ”

“ The terrible situation on the second day after the great disaster only intensifies the horror. As information becomes more full and accurate, it does not abate one tittle of the awful havoc. Rather it adds to it, and gives a thousand-fold terror to the dreadful calamity. ”

“ Often in the quietest backwaters, where no current is, where not a ripple disturbs the still surface, disaster so absolute, so overwhelming comes, that the very tragedy of it sinks out of sight also, unrecognised, unrecorded. ”

“ And strangely enough, if there are but few references to the problem in all our rapidly-growing literature, it is not because catastrophies are few. Indeed it would seem that with the advent of the industrial age, disasters grow more frequent every year. [1] Many are small, no doubt, touching but the life of a village or a borough—a broken dyke, a bridge swept out by ice, a caved-in mine. Others again write themselves on the pages of History—an Ohio flood, an Omaha tornado, a Chicago fire, a San Francisco earthquake, a Halifax explosion. ”

“ I told her that in a very short period a great many serious catastrophes, such as frequent earthquakes, great inundations, and similar unfortunate and most terrible events, had shocked the world and buried whole cities, destroyed the lives and fortunes of thousands upon thousands of happy and innocent persons. ”

“ No: it is not the great and rare calamities of the world, the floods which sweep away whole villages, the earthquakes which swallow up our towns, that affect me. My heart is wasted by the thought of that destructive power which lies concealed in every part of universal nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every one has a feeling of the irretrievable effects of disaster, the collapse of a bridge, the destruction of a house by fire, or the wreck of a ship; these things involve losses which indeed may be forgotten after reconstruction, but never balanced. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There you have the sum total, the last will and testament of this dying year, which has devoured countless victims, and spread disaster far and wide—the result at this present moment of "Human Progress." ”

“ 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. ”