Edward Bellamy

Name: Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887 — Chapter 8
Author: Edward Bellamy

Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887… (1888)

Summary

“Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887 — Chapter 8”, published in 1888, is a work by Edward Bellamy. It explores elements such as identity, waking and city.

Quotes from Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887… (Edward Bellamy)

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887… (1888)

“ There are no words for the mental torture I endured during this helpless, eyeless groping for myself in a boundless void. No other experience of the mind gives probably anything like the sense of absolute intellectual arrest from the loss of a mental fulcrum, a starting point of thought, which comes during such a momentary obscuration of the sense of one's identity. I trust I may never know what it is again.
I do not know how long this condition had lasted--it seemed an interminable time--when, like a flash, the recollection of everything came back to me. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887… (1888)

“ There were no rallying points, nothing was left stable. There only remained the will, and was any human will strong enough to say to such a weltering sea, "Peace, be still"? I dared not think. Every effort to reason upon what had befallen me, and realize what it implied, set up an intolerable swimming of the brain. The idea that I was two persons, that my identity was double, began to fascinate me with its simple solution of my experience. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887… (1888)

“ A man may leave his native city in childhood, and return fifty years later, perhaps, to find it transformed in many features. He is astonished, but he is not bewildered. He is aware of a great lapse of time, and of changes likewise occurring in himself meanwhile. He but dimly recalls the city as he knew it when a child. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887… (1888)

“ For two hours I walked or ran through the streets of the city, visiting most quarters of the peninsular part of the town. None but an antiquarian who knows something of the contrast which the Boston of today offers to the Boston of the nineteenth century can begin to appreciate what a series of bewildering surprises I underwent during that time. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887… (1888)

“ If you will not go away quite yet, I shall be myself soon."
"Indeed I will not go away," she said, with a little quiver of her face, more expressive of her sympathy than a volume of words. "You must not think us so heartless as we seemed in leaving you so by yourself. I scarcely slept last night, for thinking how strange your waking would be this morning; but father said you would sleep till late. He said that it would be better not to show too much sympathy with you at first, but to try to divert your thoughts and make you feel that you were among friends." ”

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Source: Wikisource

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887… (1888)

“ My feet must have instinctively brought me back to the site of my old home, for I had no clear idea of returning thither. It was no more homelike to me than any other spot in this city of a strange generation, nor were its inmates less utterly and necessarily strangers than all the other men and women now on the earth. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887… (1888)

“ I was no more able to distinguish myself from pure being during those moments than we may suppose a soul in the rough to be before it has received the ear-marks, the individualizing touches which make it a person. ”

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Source: Wikisource

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887… (1888)

“ I know, as well as I know that the world now is heaven compared with what it was in your day, that the only feeling you will have after a little while will be one of thankfulness to God that your life in that age was so strangely cut off, to be returned to you in this. ”

Edward Bellamy

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Quotes from Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887… (Edward Bellamy)

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