Décolletage

“ This made her tug and strain again like a demented creature, until she sank exhausted, but not free, in the mud at the foot of the snag. As she did so, her head fell forward on her breast, and the hood of her cloak again covered her shining hair.
At that moment, just as suddenly as the light had shone out before, the darkness came down with a swish, and all the vile things that loved it came out of their hiding-places with a kind of whispering screech which grew louder and louder as they swarmed abroad on the marshes. ”

“ His picture of the Deluge is, perhaps, the finest historical landscape in the world. You see a waste of waters, wide, interminable the sun is labouring, wan and weary, up the sky the clouds, dull and leaden, lie like a load upon the eye, and heaven and earth seem commingling into one confused mass! ”

“ But while the physical desolation of the land is that which is primarily set forth in this brief opening section of the chapter, there is also contained in it, if not directly, at least indirectly, an announcement of a destructive judgment of the people, " inasmuch as the desolation of the land also involves the destruction of the people living in it." ”

“ In the village churchyard she lies,
Dust is in her beautiful eyes,
No more she breathes, nor feels, nor stirs;
At her feet and at her head
Lies a slave to attend the dead,
But their dust is white as hers. ”

“ And most of all is one made aware of the terrible desolation—desolation only rendered more desolate by the presence of humanity—of those half-ruined farm-houses, approached by windy paths or deep-cut lanes, which seem to rise, like huge fungoid things, here and there over that sad land. ”

“ Destruction and the destructive spirit may prepare the way for new things under the sun, new forms of life. As mighty glaciers hollow out valleys and in time leave meadows and woods and brooks in their track, so frightful human energies—what we commonly sum up as evil (das Böse) —may be cyclopean architects and road-builders of humanity. ”

“ Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fire, begged upon the road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless houses. ”

“ With the breaking of the silent dawn, shadowed in a lonely archway or on an abandoned doorstep the wet, bedraggled body of a hapless moth is sometimes found, her iridescent wings flattened in the mud. Then for a brief moment a cry of protest, or scorn, or pity goes up. The passers-by raise their hands in anger, draw their skirts aside in horror, or kneel in tenderness. ”

“ Suddenly, a lull having occurred in the icy blast which was blinding him, the boy perceived, at a short distance in front of him, a cluster of roofs and of chimneys, the reverse of a silhouette,—a city painted in white on a black horizon, something like what we call nowadays a negative proof. ”

“ A fruitful decrepitude, under which germinates the new life. Little by little the ruin progresses; deep crevices, which are not visible, ramify in the darkness, and internally reduce to powder the venerable structure, which still appears a solid mass without; and suddenly, some fine day, this ancient ensemble of worm-eaten things, of which decaying societies are composed, becomes shapeless, the nails come out, the structure becomes disjointed, and overhangs. ”

“ Whirling round and round, extending their arms to the sky, sometimes casting themselves headlong on the ground, biting the earth with savage lips, tearing their flesh with knives, one or two falling stone-dead before our very eyes, these poor people in their delirium cried like animals, and filled the whole woods with their melancholic wailing. ”

“ A dim crowd, in this "darkness visible," is fermenting, thronging, struggling, and pushing in the aisle. At the further end, in that vaulted semicircle where once stood the altar of the Lord, rises a complicated scaffolding behung with black cloth. With your imagination already excited, you may fancy the dark construction a death-scaffold for the execution of a criminal—it is only the death-scaffold of the social state of France. ”

“ The dust of a buried city, of a people who had lived when the earth was a couple of thousand years or more younger, when western Europe was the home of barbarians. The dust of buildings that had been erected by the most civilised peoples then dwelling in the world, and this now rising in the thick dense cloud which seemed as if it would never pass. ”

“ Which soon the wasting scythe shall sweep away;
As smiles the flow'ret in the verdant field,
Which soon before the passing blast shall yield;
So flourish we upon our beds of clay,
So grow a while, so droop, and so decay.
Dust turns to dust, with ashes, ashes blend,
But upward, upward let the soul ascend ”

“ A sky broods from afar, a stalactite sun accounts merely a jot above that thin road into despair. Grass lies everywhere dead, faded tongues above an earth afflicted with scleroderma, deadliest of skin disturbances, forerunner of deeper pestilence. ”

“ Over there on the horizon, a searchlight streams suddenly and another and another, their great fingers feeling through the black clouds for the monsters of destruction that may be winging a way above the chimney pots. Every building is tightly shuttered. ”

“ Then there are the inevitable ruinousness, the alleys with broken gutters in the centre, the pools of slime or the heaps of dust according to the weather, and the general shabbiness of blank walls of sun-dried bricks which give one the impression, I believe an unjust one, of decay and retrogression. ”

“ There was no distinction of dress among that restless, surging, throbbing throng of humanity, drawn thither by the all-absorbing motive—the glittering dust that lay hidden beneath the gravel and sands of the streams and along the ravines. ”

“ I saw the past generations enveloped in a cloud of dust, in which they could not recognize one another, and that was why they fought against one another, slaying one another by the millions. Dust was being continually strewed over them. ”

“ Houses were toppled down miles away, and not a living thing, even in remote places, could keep its feet. The air was filled with a rain of plough-shares, grave-stones, and marble balls, intermixed with the heads, limbs, and bodies, of what had been human beings. ”

“ Almost the only relief to the sterility—sterile not only in respect to pleasing vegetation, but in any comfortable suggestiveness—is when the sun shines suddenly straight down some rift-like gulch in the precipitous walls, transmuting what seemed a crystal-clear atmosphere into a golden dust finer than any flakes that ever came out of the gravels. ”

“ The more energetic the effort has been to recover from this state, and to shake off all appearance of poverty, the more assuredly the curse seems to fasten on the scene, and the unslaked mortar, and unfinished wall, and ghastly desolation of incompleteness entangled in decay, strike a deeper despondency into the beholder. ”

“ She pushed on steadily through the mud and water, her long garments speedily becoming soaked with the watery elements and greatly impeding her ease and rapidity of motion, while her heart began to beat wildly with terror at the darkness, the desolation and loneliness of the country road. ”

“ Their effects upon the physical and mental system are equally prostrating. The desolation of one kind and another which meets the eye every where; the sense of vastness associated with dearth and barrenness, and of sublimity connected with eternal, killing frost;—of loneliness coupled with a thousand natural causes of one's destruction; perpetual journeyings over endless declivities, among tempests, through freezing torrents; one half the time on foot, with nothing but moccasins to protect the feet from the flinty gravel and the thorns of the prickly pear along the unbeaten way ”

“ On the ground in front of the houses, spread out upon the mud and filth, the extravagant rag-fair that began last autumn is still going on; the remains of so much pillage and burning are left that it seems as though there was no end to them,—magnificently embroidered clothing spotted with blood, Buddhas, grotesque figures, jewels, dead men's wigs, cracked vases, or precious fragments of jade. ”

“ Like a flood that slowly undermines a bank, and which the proprietor regards not when he sees so tiny a current dribbling and oozing through, and scarcely bowing the grass between which it trickles, so came the Destroyer—slowly and almost imperceptibly undermining the current of life, and eating out the foundations, until there needed but one mighty rush, and all was over beyond recovery, and the work of destruction was completed. ”

“ It is an ether myth. The attempt to explain the existence of the world on the basis of an ether myth was not uncommon. The deluge was not the last of these destructions. Some races supposed a great fire to have swept over the earth and to have destroyed all save a few who hid themselves in caves."
4. We may understand the basis of the deluge story to be a legend transmitting historical memories which, though mythical and colored, have still the fate of actual men as their subject — an historical origin.
This is the view advanced by Delitzsch. [3]
5. ”

“ An incessant destruction of individuals must have been going on through their being swept up the beaches and dried, or by their being swept out to sea and sinking down out of reach of air and sun. Early conditions favoured the development of every tendency to root and hold on, every tendency to form an outer skin and casing to protect the stranded individual from immediate desiccation. ”

“ By the time the public has wiped it out of its eyes and sneezed it out of its nose and coughed it out of its larynx, the dust has settled in a heavy layer, clues are obliterated, and the public lifts its skirts and chooses another direction. ”

“ These features, an image of which is carried in our minds from childhood, are bound up with and are part and parcel of the feeling, so that to make any change in such a spot, to blow up the headland, for instance, as any one could do with a few shillings' worth of dynamite, or to alter and deface the surface of the adjacent land and build big houses and other ugly structures on it, would be felt by every pilgrim as an indignity, a hateful vandalism. ”

“ The snuff seems to be made of the decay of matting, wood, cloth, stone, iron, earth, and something else. Is the something else, the decay of dead citizens in the vaults below? As sure as Death it is! Not only in the cold, damp February day, do we cough and sneeze dead citizens, all through the service, but dead citizens have got into the very bellows of the organ, and half choked the same. We stamp our feet to warm them, and dead citizens arise in heavy clouds. ”

“ The bodies of the afflicted outwardly to the touch were not very hot, but inwardly they so burned as not to endure the lightest clothes or linen garment, and they would fain have cast themselves into the cold water. ”

“ There were smartly-dressed men here and there with grimy chins and features frankly dirty. It seemed strange to see individuals with good coats and spotless linen grimed and lined with the dust of yesterday. ”

“ And there came to me the jaded voices of men, in curse and snarl of slow-plodding, jaded animals.
I opened my eyes, that were inflamed with dust, and immediately fresh dust bit into them. On the coarse blankets on which I lay the dust was half an inch thick. Above me, through sifting dust, I saw an arched roof of lurching, swaying canvas, and myriads of dust motes descended heavily in the shafts of sunshine that entered through holes in the canvas. ”

“ It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. ”

“ The paltry, dirty, and evil things that suggested to him contempt and sometimes even disgust at the sight of men had completely disappeared, just as, to people rising in a balloon, the mud and filth of the narrow streets become invisible and ugliness changes into beauty. ”

“ The very green dust on the walls is an organized vegetable; the atmosphere has its fauna and flora floating in it; and shall we think that dreams are but dust and ashes, are always disintegrated and crumbling thoughts, and not dust-like thoughts trooping to their standard with music,—systems beginning to be organized? These expectations,—these are roots, these are nuts, which even the poorest man has in his bin, and roasts or cracks them occasionally in winter evenings,—which even the poor debtor retains with his bed and his pig, i. e., his idleness and sensuality. ”

“ The land was well tilled and nowhere was there a blade of grass or any kind of plant to be seen, it was all black. "Ah, what a destructive creature is man....How many different plant-lives he destroys to support his own existence!" ”

“ The destruction takes place both from above and below at once, so that the gable and the foundation are dashed in pieces with one blow, and that even to the neck, i.e., up to the point at which the roof or gable rests upon the walls. ”