Weekend Words: Plunge
Some call it a plunge, some call it a correction, some call it the end of the world. The global economy grips its seat as the stock market slide rattles nerves for a second week in a row.
Some call it a plunge, some call it a correction, some call it the end of the world. The global economy gripped its seat as the stock market slide rattled nerves for a second week in a row.
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
—Alan Watts
Separation from his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side.
—Carl Gustav Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 1957
These Great Old Ones…. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.
—H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
—W. H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening”
He sobbed and he sighed, and a gurgle he gave,
Then he plunged himself in the billowy wave,
And an echo arose from the suicide’s grave–
“Oh willow, titwillow, titwillow!”
—W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado
When a plunge is to be made into the water, it’s of no use lingering on the bank.
—Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.
—Janet Malcolm
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down —
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing — then —
—Emily Dickinson, “I felt a Funeral in my Brain”
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
—Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The power of the whole is undeniable. Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
—Virginia Woolf, on Elizabethan drama
The rainy Pleiads wester,
Orion plunges prone,
The stroke of midnight ceases,
And I lie down alone.
—A. E. Housman, More Poems, no. 11
Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy! Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!
—Marquis De Sade
Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony — this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.
—Jean Baudrillard
One thing I have learned in my painful career as a gambler is that bragging when you get lucky and win a few games will plunge you into gloom and unacceptable beatings very soon. It happens every time.
—Hunter S. Thompson
