United States or Iraq ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A great part of our production of to-day culminates not in productive goods, but in services, as in forms of motion, or in ability to talk across a distance. It is true that statistics that deal with the world's production of cotton, or of oil, or of iron and steel present stupendous results. But even these do not go far enough.
"Other people are born abroad, and never know the delight of real travel. But, after all, America is best. The life of the world culminates here. We are the prow of the vessel; there may be more comfort amidships, but we are the first to touch the unknown seas.
In the early morning one watches the silent battle of dawn and darkness upon the waters of Tahoe with a placid interest; but when the shadows sulk away and one by one the hidden beauties of the shore unfold themselves in the full splendor of noon; when the still surface is belted like a rainbow with broad bars of blue and green and white, half the distance from circumference to centre; when, in the lazy summer afternoon, he lies in a boat, far out to where the dead blue of the deep water begins, and smokes the pipe of peace and idly winks at the distant crags and patches of snow from under his cap-brim; when the boat drifts shoreward to the white water, and he lolls over the gunwale and gazes by the hour down through the crystal depths and notes the colors of the pebbles and reviews the finny armies gliding in procession a hundred feet below; when at night he sees moon and stars, mountain ridges feathered with pines, jutting white capes, bold promontories, grand sweeps of rugged scenery topped with bald, glimmering peaks, all magnificently pictured in the polished mirror of the lake, in richest, softest detail, the tranquil interest that was born with the morning deepens and deepens, by sure degrees, till it culminates at last in resistless fascination!
The connection between chess and Arabdom should not be forgotten, especially as the very word with which it culminates, "checkmate," is but a corruption of the Arabic "sheïkh mát" "chief dead." The king of games is, however, rare on the whole, requiring too much concentration for a weary or lazy official, or a merchant after a busy day.
Baden Powell conveys this argument: "The very essence of the whole argument is the invariable preservation of the principle of order: not necessarily such as we can directly recognise, but the universal conviction of the unfailing subordination of everything to some grand principles of law, however imperfectly apprehended in our partial conceptions, and the successive subordination of such laws to others of still higher generality, to an extent transcending our conceptions, and constituting the true chain of universal causation which culminates in the sublime conception of the COSMOS.
And this is the writing of an unknown, untried youth! This exquisitely simple, easy, idiomatic, and nervous style marks all Thackeray's work for his twenty-six years of activity, and is equally perfect for whatever purpose it is used, and in whatever key he may choose to compose. It naturally culminates in Vanity Fair, written just in the middle of his literary career.
On the other hand, we now see why the feminism which recurs intermittently in our 'western' world culminates in those phases of its history when that world has been strong enough to close its avenues of intrusion for a while; in the far past which has left us the great goddesses and other matrilineal survivals; in industrial Babylonia; in the Minoan palaces; in fifth-and fourth-century Greece, as Aristophanes joins with Euripides to admit, and Euripides with Plato to advocate; in the Femmes savantes of renascent Europe; in eighteenth-century France, which seemed to itself so impregnable; and in the fin-de-siècle Europe of yesterday, pulling down its barns to build greater.
The common effect of this is a "deficient mental energy generally commencing with unnatural drowsiness or loss of appetite and a yearning for stimulants which culminates in that lowering of nerve potential which we know so well as neurasthenia." Thus write the professors of medicine in India on the effects of prolonged heat.
"But as one day an' the next trails by, the boys sorter gets lined up one way an' t'other; some for Benson Annie an' some for Sal, an' things is shorely gettin' hot. Hamilton, over at the dance-hall, ups an' names his place the 'Sal Saloon, an' Burns takes down the sign on the Red Light an' calls it the 'Benson Annie House. Finally things sorter culminates.
It is a disgraceful epic patched with splendid episodes, but it culminates in an appalling cry of doubt whether, after all, it might not be better for England to perish utterly in the great war while fighting for liberty than to survive to behold the triumph of the "governing class" in a servile State of old-age pensions and Insurance Acts.
Word Of The Day