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We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither up nor down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. I will answer the call of chaos and old night. I will ride on the Nightmare; but she shall not ride on me. The Telegraph Poles
The very Whigs themselves are shaken. 'Tis to King James, England begins to look for salvation from this topsy-turveydom. The tide runs strongly in our favor. Strongly, sir! If we stay for the ebb, we may stay for good; for there may never be another flow within our lifetime." "Your lordship is grown strangely hot upon this question," said Caryll, very full of wonder.
The quaint topsy-turveydom of it caused me many a chuckle of amusement when I recalled the interview during the next few days; but, of course, I never dreamed of any actual attempt to carry out the threat. "Imagine, therefore, my astonishment when I realized that not only had the complaint been made, but the law had actually been set at least tentatively in motion.
The fact is, you are too borne, too one-sided, to be accepted as as a "king of men." You take such broad views that you grow narrow. What you want is a little knowledge of life, and twelve months' hard labour. But though topsy-turveydom may be attained with comparative ease, it performs a lofty philosophical function. Everything rusts by use.
The world of slang is a kind of topsy-turveydom of poetry, full of blue moons and white elephants, of men losing their heads, and men whose tongues run away with them a whole chaos of fairy tales. The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are, first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in consequence very happy.
For Barraca held the sea, and the wealthy and enterprising south was strongly opposed to war, while Dom Corria trusted to the mountains and drew his partisans from the less energetic north. This bald statement has an unconvincing sound in the ears of races which dwell north of the equator, but it must be remembered that Brazil, in more respects than one, is the land of topsy-turveydom.
The history of philosophy and science is merely a tale of development by topsy-turveydom, every new thinker simply contradicting his predecessor. Thales said water was the primitive principle of all things; so Anaximander said it was air, whereupon Anaximenes said it was matter.
The triumph of topsy-turveydom was when Galileo, the Oscar Wilde of Astronomy, declared that the earth went round the sun a sheer piece of inversion. Darwin, the Barry Pain of Biology, asserted that man rose from the brutes, and that, instead of creatures being adapted to conditions, conditions adapted creatures.
In fact, there is no domain of intellect in which a judicious cultivation of topsy-turveydom may not be recommended. Ask why R. A.'s are invariably colour-blind, and you become a great art critic, while a random regret that Mendelssohn had no ear for music will bring you to the very front in musical circles.
The idea is in part a survival from earlier years when a host of military officers, Civil Servants, journalists and tourists described in some form the more obvious peculiarities of the colonies: their giant, evergreen forests, strange amorphous animals, aristocratic gold-diggers, ex-convicts in carriages, and general state of topsy-turveydom.
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