Literary notes about tottering (AI summary)
Tottering is deployed throughout literature to convey a state of precarious instability—both physically and metaphorically. Authors evoke a sense of imminent collapse when describing a character’s unsteady limbs or wavering progress, as when a weary protagonist moves with tottering steps or a burdensome body struggles to remain upright ([1], [2], [3]). At the same time, tottering extends beyond human frailty to characterize fading institutions, frail structures, or beleaguered states on the brink of downfall, suggesting that what once was solid is now vulnerable to imminent disintegration ([4], [5], [6]). This versatile imagery allows writers to blur the lines between the tangible destabilization of physical bodies and the abstract unraveling of ideas and powers, enriching the text with both literal and symbolic layers of decay and transition ([7], [8]).
- Levin went into the pen, looked Pava over, and lifted the red and spotted calf onto her long, tottering legs.
— from Anna Karenina by graf Leo Tolstoy - This having been administered at a neighbouring public-house, he conducted me, with tottering steps, to the Misses Spenlow’s door.
— from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens - Thus tottering on the dizzy brink, we were happy.
— from The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - And now the bridge hangs tottering Above the boiling tide.
— from Lays of Ancient Rome by Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay - Spain’s government was already tottering in the Philippines when the Spanish-American war broke out.
— from The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912 by James H. Blount - Their Idolatries appear to have been in a tottering state; much was getting into confusion and fermentation among them.
— from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle - I informed her that my reason was tottering on its throne, and only she, Miss Mills, could prevent its being deposed.
— from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens - Everything in the domain of ethic is evolved, changeable, tottering; all things flow, it is true—but all things are also in the stream: to their goal.
— from Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
