United States or Faroe Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The first muster of a college class in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads, fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices.
In the next instant the Chinaman, terrified, returned through the open door. Behind him lurched Half-past Full, and stumbled into the room. His boot caught, and he pitched, but saved himself and stood swaying, heavily looking at Drake. The hair curled dense over his bull head, his mustache was spread with his grin, the light of cloddish humor and destruction burned in his big eye.
I was in my cloddish egotism trying to show her that she was irreverent BECAUSE she could believe what in my soul I do not, though I dare not admit so much even to myself. She took from some strange passing visitor to her tortured bedside what was to her a revelation. She heard it first as a child hears a story of magic. When she came out of the hospital, she told it as if it was one.
"Be happy, then," said Achilles Tatius, "since thy vile, cloddish spirit feels suffocation rather than refreshment in gales, which, instead of causing death, might recall the dead themselves to life.
He appeared to become grosser, almost cloddish. If aught of interest or beauty even ruined beauty had heretofore been visible in this man, the beholder might now begin to doubt it, and to accuse his own imagination of deluding him with whatever grace had flickered over that visage, and whatever exquisite lustre had gleamed in those filmy eyes.
Material wealth could be evenly distributed, but it could not remain that way unless Society made sure that the man who was more clever than the rest could not increase his wealth at the expense of his less fortunate brethren. Make it a social stigma to show more ability than the average. Be kind to your fellow man; don't show him up as a stupid clod, no matter how cloddish he may be.
The impulse towards the absolute seizes him suddenly in the midst of his animality, and as in this cloddish condition all his efforts aim only at the material and temporal, and are limited by his individuality, he is only led by that demand of the reason to extend his individuality into the infinite, instead of to abstract from it.
Let us not crawl on with our stomachs to the ground, and not an ounce of vision in our heads for fear lest we be called visionaries. And let us rid our minds of one or two noxious superstitions. It is not true that country life need mean dull and cloddish life; it has in the past, because agriculture as been neglected for the false glamour of the towns, and village life left to seed down.
That the hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out of the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and suitable. But the house of an intelligent, civilised, and sophisticated man should never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should rather be an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish life.
He would be capable of using his brain as fast as his hand acted. A tingle of new life, new possibilities were opening before him. He had always accepted himself as a stupidly hopeless burden in the world, a burden on his friends, useless, cloddish. Now he found that he had hopes. His own mind and body was an undiscovered country which he was just beginning to enter.
Word Of The Day