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The three emotions are not at all inconsistent. The pessimistic moralist might say that it was all very shocking, the optimistic moralist might say that it was hopeful, the unreflective humourist might simply be transported by the absurdity; yet not to be amused at such a scene would appear to me to be both dull and priggish.
My father had succeeded in presenting my ambition as the height of absurdity and presumption, and with something of the despair of a shipwrecked mariner my eyes rested on the green expanses of those book-backs, Bohn's Standard Library! Nor did it occur to him or to me that one might be great in literature without having read so much as a gritty page of them....
There is something in the nature of poetic irony in the fact that the anarchist should take the very ethics of capitalism and reduce them to an absurdity. It is something in the nature of a satire, sordid and terrible, which the realism of things has here written.
This hope helped to console him under the extraordinary expense to which he was exposed by the profusion of his wife, especially when he considered that his compliance with her prodigality would be limited to the expiration of the nine months, of which the best part was by this time elapsed: yet, in spite of all this philosophical resignation, her fancy sometimes soared to such a ridiculous and intolerable pitch of insolence and absurdity, that his temper forsook him, and he could not help wishing in secret that her pride might be confounded in the dissipation of her most flattering hopes, even though he himself should be a principal sufferer by the disappointment.
Or perhaps she's found some good provider who's willing to marry her." Norman sprang up, his eyes blazing, his mouth working cruelly. "By God!" he cried. "If I thought that!" His sister was alarmed. Such a man in such a delirium might commit any absurdity. He flung himself down in despair. "Urse, why can't I get rid of this thing? It's ruining me. It's killing me!"
Langham had rarely felt more awkward than he did then, as he sat leaning forward under the tree, this slim indignant creature standing over him, and his consciousness about equally divided between a sense of her absurdity and a sense of her prettiness. 'You are an advocate worth having, Miss Leyburn, he said at last, an enigmatical smile he could not restrain playing about his mouth.
I had fired off my little joke on Ito; illustrated to him, I fondly thought, the absurdity of indiscriminately dragging in the word "honourable" in and out of season. How would he take it, I wondered. "The august captain may honourably rely upon his unworthy lieutenant to do his honourable best," he gravely answered; and the next moment was "honourably" descending the bridge ladder to the deck.
"But how do you know that you have not already shot the king of the geese?" said La Salle, anxious to investigate the peculiar monomania of this poor lunatic; for such, indeed, he evidently was. "Why, mon," said he, evidently surprised at the absurdity of the question, "by his croun, of course.
'This man doth not cast out demons, but by Beelzebub, the prince of the demons. That is the last resort of prejudice so deep that it will father an absurdity rather than yield to evidence.
When our prayers fail, it must be better than if they had succeeded, so that prayer, with all free preference whatsoever, becomes an absurdity. The trouble is much deeper than that which so many people find in determinism.
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