Chaos

“ Chaos thrust forth his fingers o'er the land,
And as when seas encroach upon a strand,
Moved, an immeasurable flood of Night,
Across the spring, while men and beasts in flight
Avoided the dark terror close at hand ”

“ I, a human chaos, a nebula of confused elements, I move amongst finished worlds—peoples of complete laws and pure order, whose thoughts are assorted, whose dreams are arranged, and whose visions are enrolled and registered. ”

“ The monsters back to Hell's profoundest deep,
Where, mocking Spring and Sun-rise, they have grown
On longings for the sea, the world must weep
When, from its heart, the hope of Peace has flown.
KAISER, BEWARE
Dost thou, mad Kaiser, for historic name,
Set fire to Europe? Is it joy to gaze
At blacker smoke than Etna's, and a blaze
That wakes up Chaos, wild to come and claim
The World, since Light, God-bidden though it came,
Has failed to dawn upon our human ways?
O Twin of Chaos! peer thou through the haze!
'Tis Human Beings feed the crackling flame. ”

“ And it is equally clear that we experience every hour the effects of our fall and ruin. What, then, comes to us from all this chaos and wild confusion, in a voice of irresistible conviction, but the irrefragable truth of both those sides of humanity? ”

“ That thought, reflection, articulate utterance and understanding be awakened in these individual million heads, which are the atoms of your Chaos: there is no other way of illuminating any Chaos! The sum-total of intelligence that is found in it, determines the extent of order that is possible for your Chaos,—the feasibility and rationality of what your Chaos will dimly demand from you, and will gladly obey when proposed by you! ”

“ The requisite and only serviceable fiction, therefore, is the representation of chaos as one vast homogeneous drop! In this sense it may be even justified, as an appropriate symbol of the great fundamental truth that all things spring from, and subsist in, the endless strife between indifference and difference. ”

“ A valley of anarchy, — a confession that harmony of the elements was hopeless here, and that the toil of Nature for cycles working a world out of chaos, had failed, and achieved only a relapse into ruin, drearier than chaos. ”

“ Let the elm by the road feel a shock to the core,
Lean forward, and totter at the will of the storm!
Let the heights of the rock roll the avalanche down,
Let the torrents rave hoarse, and in night's murky frown
Let old Chaos appear in its primitive form! ”

“ How long is chaos and confusion to reign amongst men? How long will discord agitate the face of society? The winds of despair are, alas, blowing from every direction, and the strife that divideth and afflicteth the human race is daily increasing. ”

“ Before earth and sea and heaven were created, all things wore one aspect, to which we give the name of Chaos—a confused and shapeless mass, nothing but dead weight, in which, however, slumbered the seeds of things. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Amid the turmoil and tumult of battle, there may be seeming disorder and yet no real disorder at all; amid confusion and chaos, your array may be without head or tail, yet it will be proof against defeat. ”

“ It may be that the fabric of our civilization will crumbling fall to unmeaning chaos and to formless dust, where oblivion broods and even memory forgets. Perhaps the blind Samson of some imprisoned force, released by thoughtless chance, may so wreck and strand the world that man, in stress and strain of want and fear, will shudderingly crawl back to savage and barbaric night. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We inveigh against fickle fortune, against the strange accidents of our lot, and lo! chaos is made clear by a fearful flash of lightning or a marvellous beam of light, and human wisdom is humbled by the great lessons of fate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Suddenly the rock upon which we stood began to crumble; huge fragments broke away at our very feet and went whirling down into the yawning gulf.
Hope!
The word was but mockery!
Chaos would have been more befitting, for chaos had surely come! ”

“ At such times all existence begins to look like an unending nightmare. We see the bright unnumbered throng of stars as so many specks of dust on the dark mantle of old Chaos, most ancient of devils. And even they appear remote and unfriendly. ”

“ Then rose the seed of Chaos, and of Night,
To blot out Order, and extinguish Light,
Of dull and venal a new world to mould,
And bring Saturnian days of Lead and Gold. ”

“ The luminous inferior orbs enclosed⁠420
From Chaos and the inroad of Darkness old,
Satan alighted walks. A globe far off
It seemed, now seems a boundless continent,
Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night
Starless exposed, and ever-threatening storms
Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky ”

“ When in ancient times people spoke of Chaos, they meant the womb of all being, the exalted realm of uncreated things, where indeed forms such as are evident to the eye in the created world are not to be found, but in place of them are the archetypes of all visible forms, as though nurtured in a spiritual seed-condition. ”

“ But into the midst of this menacing chaos light has already begun to penetrate with an organizing power; and over the dark profound hovers a spirit which can and will divide the darkness from the light, and prepare a new creation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The conception is that of the human race as a whole, fighting against chaos without and darkness within, the little tiny lamp of reason growing gradually into a great light by which the night is dispelled. The divisions between races, nations and creeds should be treated as follies, distracting us in the battle against Chaos and Old Night, which is our one truly human activity. ”

“ But, as in those earliest ages, will not thoughtful faces arise out of the darkness? (For this is Chaos and the animal Kingdom; and Reason being no more, she has yet to be born.) ”

“ For it is by conflict, as we have now learnt, that the higher emerges from the lower, and nature herself, it would almost seem, does not direct but looks on, as her world emerges in painful toil from chaos. ”

“ Such a heart is, at least to the limited ken of others, a chaos,—but a chaos from which he who imbosoms it, and who alone can understand it, calls up,—less like a god than a demon,—the evil elements, which create the lurid sphere his greatness. ”

“ He believed in the ‘determinate and bounding form’ of all things, in ‘the bounding line and its infinite inflections and movements.’ ‘Leave out this line,’ he wrote, ‘and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again....’ And chaos is the arch-enemy of the artist, who strives to fashion from the corrupt materials at hand the enduring forms of his imagination. To Blake the sky appeared a most excellent canopy, a majestical roof fretted with golden fire, as it did to Hamlet or any other man. So, too, our earth appears a lovely, fruitful dwelling-place. ”

“ There are tumults of the mind when like the great convulsions of nature all seems anarchy and returning chaos, yet often in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the material strife itself, some new principle of order, or some new impulse of conduct, develops itself, and controls and regulates and brings to an harmonious consequence, passions and elements which seemed only to threaten despair and subversion. ”

“ But all seem to forget to restore order, for chaos is not man’s prerogative, and that in every history we read how such convulsion inevitably threw mankind back almost into elemental barbarism, glad even of the refuge of a tyranny against the more cruel dominion of their own passions. ”

“ Bleeding in the feet, for example, so rarely practised in better times, is now among the fashionable follies of the day. That gentle, civilized system of evacuation, which prevailed under my auspices, is subverted by the reign of anarchy and emetics, of quackery and poison. In short, chaos is come again! Every one orders what seems good in his own eyes; there is no deference to the authority of ancient wisdom; our masters are laid upon the shelf, and their axioms not one tittle the more regarded for being delivered in languages as defunct as the subjects of their application. ”

“ CHAOS AND REDEMPTION Present world chaos, exhibiting the impetuosity, follies, rebelliousness characteristic of humanity’s adolescent stage of development, and harbinger of the long-promised Golden Age of the maturity of the human race, is relentlessly spreading and distressingly intensified. The alternating victories and reverses, heralding parallel transition of proscribed Cause of Bahá’u’lláh struggling towards emancipation, world recognition and spiritual universal dominion, are simultaneously multiplying. ”

“ Quicker than thought he traverses space, which will one day disappear (a truly marvellous idea, this!) ; on the farther side of the howling remains of chaos he comes to the boundaries of those regions which are as imperishable as the vengeance which created them—cursed regions, death's grave and cradle, over which time has no power, and which will still exist when the universe has been carried away like a tent that is set up for a day; ... he follows no path through the darkness, but, drawn downwards by the weight of his crimes (!) , descends naturally into hell. ”

“ Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
“And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth
“In form and shape compact and beautiful,
“In will, in action free, companionship,
“And thousand other signs of purer life;
“So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
“A power more strong in beauty, born of us
“And fated to excel us, as we pass
“In glory that old Darkness: nor are we
“Thereby more conquer’d, than by us the rule
“Of shapeless Chaos. ”

“ That chaos of human affairs and intrigues where we can see no light, that mass of disorder and confusion which they often present to our view, is all clearness and order in the sight of Him who is governing and directing the whole, and bringing forward every event in its due time and place. ”

“ In the great Simplicity lies the beginning of essential qualities. When substance, form and essential qualities are still indistinguishably blended together it is called Chaos. Chaos means that all things are chaotically intermixed and not yet separated from one another. The purer and lighter elements, tending upwards, made the Heavens; the grosser and heavier elements, tending downwards, made the Earth. ”

“ Old winds that blew
When chaos was, what do
They tell the clattered trees that I
Should weep? ”

“ The Foreign Chaos differs from the Domestic variety in that it is “an end rather than a beginning, a Chaos in which the Tower of Babel had fallen.”
Once more, to translate the O’Brien speechifying into speech—for the benefit of readers who are not movie fans—the American [154] brand of Chaos is fresh and the European Chaos is stale.
The elemental principles underlying all forms of creation are the same, whether you are creating a short story or a buckwheat cake. The same dynamic laws must be obeyed. ”

“ Joy to great Chaos! let Division reign: [R 25]
55 Chromatic tortures soon shall drive them hence, [R 26]
Break all their nerves, and fritter all their sense:
One Trill shall harmonize joy, grief, and rage,
Wake the dull Church, and lull the ranting Stage ”

“ Humanity, they argued, having climbed to the top round of the ladder of civilization, was about to take a header into chaos, after which it would doubtless pick itself up, turn round, and begin to climb again. ”

“ Naturally, in all mundane philosophy we have to start from a given point. Who or what arbitrarily set that point it is idle to surmise. We know only that it was set this side of Chaos, by something that inhabited the other side.”
“Well, you say that the something in us is our functions. ”

“ Whether Chaos or Order lay at the beginning of things is a question once much debated in the schools but afterward long in abeyance, not so much because it had been solved as because one party had been silenced by social pressure. The question is bound to recur in an age when observation and dialectic again freely confront each other. Naturalists look back to chaos since they observe everything growing from seeds and shifting its character in regeneration. ”

“ This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. ”

“ An atom tossed in a chaos made
Of yeasting worlds, which bubble and foam.
Whence have I come?
What would be home?
I hear no answer. I am afraid! ”