Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 4, 2025
I remember myself as a sort of anti-climax to that rather tediously asking my way home. I was somewhere in the neighbourhood of Holland Park.... It was then between one and two. I felt that I could go home now without any risk of meeting Margaret. It had been the thought of returning to Margaret that had sent me wandering that night.
The execution of Ben Hur is crude and commonplace, but the conception is by no means inartistic. Historical figures of the highest rank may perhaps be best adumbrated in this fashion, with or without one personal appearance, so brief that there shall be no danger of anti-climax.
But, as an anti-climax, he always showed up alive in vacation time. During his college years he had apparently forgotten her, had made himself conspicuous by some highly pessimistic theories, and had tried the Byronic gesture. Then, after Commencement, meeting her unexpectedly, he had turned a yellowish white.
I trembled for him when he began his great speech, for, unlike any English orator I ever heard, he did not warm to his subject gradually, taking care to make his audience accompany him step by step, but sprang in a moment to a height of passionate and tempestuous eloquence from which it seemed inevitable that he must quickly fall to an anti-climax. But no anticlimax came.
What becomes of these imaginative, inquisitive, myth-making, light-hearted, tender-hearted, and altogether charming young adventurers who start out so gayly to explore the wonder-world? The solemn answer comes, "They after a while are grown-up." Did you ever meditate on that catastrophe which we speak of as being "grown-up"? Habit has dulled our perception of the absurd anti-climax involved in it.
Of course, in these days when surgical miracles are happening continually there is nothing outstanding about this operation, and surgeons have wonderful opportunities in a military hospital, where there are so many spare human parts lying about to patch up a man with. After such a statement it is an anti-climax to have to inform the public that it was only a portion of nerve that was grafted.
But the fierce disappointment which beat upon his soul like a recurring wave, as thought drifted back and back, told him that he had fairly won hell-fire and must abide by it. So thinking, he returned to his lodging, entered unobserved and prowled the small chamber till dawn. By morning light all his life appeared transfigured and a ghastly anti-climax faced the man.
I never thought what that meant until one morning in college chapel our president turned to us and said: "Most of you think that is an anti-climax," and we would say: "Why, of course, for a man cannot fly like the eagle. He can walk down hill, what is the use talking about that walking down hill." The old man shook his head and said: "No, no.
How wonderful, it seems to us, to have been alive then, as we are alive now, to have shared in those vast national enthusiasms, "in those great deeds to have had some little part"; and is it not a sort of poor anti-climax for a world that has gone through such noble excitement to have sunk back to this level of every day!
God has not ordained the foolishness of preaching which does not mean foolish preaching to thin out in the miserable anti-climax of a remark like that of the young man I have just quoted. Fortunately, however, our artist had not sufficient experience of the conventional congregation at a place of worship to have become philosophic about it which usually amounts to indifference.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking