The deathless deed: Why evil haunts history and refuses resignation

“ You may put the past out of sight, but it lives still—lives in its hidden crimes, its secret sins, its evil and its good—lives to haunt and shape our future, let that future dream as it will of forgetfulness. ”

“ If you knew what we have lived through, must live through, who have been so tossed about by fate! Often we ask ourselves, if it is really we who have done this or been guilty of that, it seems so strange, so incredible to us; we would gladly sever the thread which binds the present with the past, but always this self, this indestructible I, that cannot set itself free from its deeds, that often grins at us like a spectre. ”

“ In the first the ghastliness of the reversal of the course of life backward, as the guests drink the elixir of youth, while it suggests the paltriness of our pleasures, is a powerful lesson in the beneficence of that daily death whereby we resign the past; this rejuvenation violates nature, and so shocks us, and by the very shock we are reconciled with nature, from which we had parted in thought. "The Christmas Banquet" is one of the most artistically conceived of all the tales, though its subject repels us ”

“ And in all I have been saying, what I have been really urging on you is this—Reverence for the life of Man upon the Earth: let the past be past, every whit of it that is not still living in us: let the dead bury their dead, but let us turn to the living, and with boundless courage and what hope we may, refuse to let the Earth be joyless in the days to come. ”

“ But the past is immortal, and rises again from the dead. We might take our walks abroad together, but we should no longer go hand in hand—a ghost strides between. He smells of the dead most unconscionably, this fawning spectre of little diplomacies. ”

“ Some of us turn away then from the din of effort, and seek in resignation the comfort of a living death; some others find in the doubt and difficulty the zest and reward of the work. After all, the past is not dead, it has not failed ”

“ Has evil so much more strength of will, so much more permanence of power that it lives on through the years and centuries, while good deeds perish with the body? It would appear so from fiction. The ghosts of good actions do not linger round the abode of the living to any noticeable extent, but evil deeds are deathless. We have many stories of places and persons haunted by the embodied evil of the past, but few by the embodied good. The revenge ghosts outnumber the grateful dead by legions. ”

“ When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rules of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world -- in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death -- the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. ”

“ Always keep in mind the uselessness of contending with the inflexible and inevitable processes of nature; but never let them become your masters when you can make them your servants.
Resignation is the more of a virtue the less it is exercised. A healthy tree bends before the blast, but straightens itself the moment the wind lulls. Resignation to evils that can be avoided is indolence or apathy. ”

“ The obliteration of the evil hath been practised by two means, some kind of redemption or expiation of that which is past, and an inception or account de novo for the time to come. But this part seemeth sacred and religious, and justly; for all good moral philosophy (as was said) is but a handmaid to religion. ”

“ We want a Society for the Suppression of Erudite Research and the Decent Burial of the Past. The ghosts of the dead past want quite as much laying as raising. ”

“ The deeds of the dead are embalmed in our hearts and in history and cannot be tarnished, obscured or obliterated. The greatest deeds of the living may be obscured and even almost blotted from the approving mind by some adverse, evil cloud—by some act of folly or perfidy. ”

“ O, would the deed were good! For now the devil, that told me I did well, Says that this deed is chronicled in hell. ”

“ But what a night has settled on our past, how little have we found skill to prolong the benefit arising from particular events or occasions. Some parts of our life, indeed, require no monument, there is nothing there we would ever again think of, if possible; but, alas! these, for the most part, have erected monuments of their own, to which, as with a sad fascination, our eyes are ever turning—persons we have injured, or who, somehow, so remind us of sin, that we shrink from meeting them—places to which sins of ours have attached a reproachful meaning. ”

“ For who can wonder that man should feel a vague belief in tales of disembodied spirits wandering through those places which they once dearly affected, when he himself, scarcely less separated from his old world than they, is for ever lingering upon past emotions and bygone times, and hovering, the ghost of his former self, about the places and people that warmed his heart of old? ”

“ In fact, the seconds of old time are yet living there, loaded with old association, and as they whirl and vibrate they sensitize us with their invisible rays. If we were endowed with new faculties, sensitive to such influences as now escape us, and with them were able to apprehend and analyse these scattered fragments of the past, these waifs of dead adventures, then we might be able to reconstruct the deeds and lives and deaths, all the unplumbed combinations of circumstance in the cities or countries of our passage. ”

“ We must consider that the place where the spirit of an evil doer abideth, is not where the mortal body is laid: but “their tombs shall be their house for ever. Their dwelling places are from generation to generation.” “Dwelling places” are wherein they abode for a season: “house” is wherein they will abide as it were for ever, that is to say, their tombs. Thus they leave their dwelling places, where they abode while they lived, to their families, and they pass as it were to everlasting houses, to their tombs. ”

“ Our actions rarely die: and many unjust deeds of ours will therefore inevitably return to life some day to claim their due and start legitimate reprisals. They will find our external life without defence; but before they can reach the inward being at the centre of that life, they must first listen to the judgment we have already passed on ourselves; and in accordance with the nature of that judgment will the attitude be of these mysterious envoys, who have come from the depths where cause and effect are poised in eternal equilibrium. ”

“ It is an appalling trial to approach a place where once we have been happier—happier far than ever we can be on this earth again; and a worse evil doth it seem to our imagination to return to Paradise, with a changed and saddened heart, than at first to be driven from it into the outer world, if still permitted to carry thither something of that spirit that had glorified our prime. ”

“ We have to do with the strangest of enemies. He has knowingly and deliberately, while in the full possession of his faculties and without necessity or excuse, revived all the crimes which we supposed to be forever buried in the barbarous past. He has trampled under foot all the precepts which man had so painfully won from the cruel darkness of his beginnings; he has violated all the laws of justice, humanity, loyalty and honour, from the highest, which are almost godlike, to the simplest, the most elementary, which [Pg 294] still belong to the lower worlds. ”