Parallel Lives

“ If we had not separated, we might now be living in a true heart-union; for I believe, strange as it may sound to you, that we were made for each other--that, when the false and evil of our lives are put off, the elements of conjunction will appear. We have made for ourselves of this world a dreary waste, when, if we had overcome the evil of our hearts, our paths would have been through green and fragrant places. ”

“ In all four of these that trait of profound isolation in life, so often used before in the earlier tales, is strongly brought out; about each is struck a circle which separates not only one from another, but from all the world, and in the midst of it, as in a separate orb, each lives an unshared life. ”

“ What I have lost no one can truly realize who does not know how the inner bond that united us, joining every fiber of our two lives together, had been interwoven in the nineteen years of undivided, untroubled wedlock, so that with the uprooting of one life the thousands and thousands of roots of the other were torn from the ground. ”

“ But I found that the crowd was made up of single human lives, not one of them wholly uninteresting, when separately known. I learned also that there are many things which belong to the whole world of us together, that no one of us, nor any few of us, can claim or enjoy for ourselves alone. ”

“ I do not know as I would have minded them—three thousand miles of them going back into the convolutions of their own individual lives, but I have wished they could have kept the vision, could have taken steps to move the vision over, could have taken up the individual lives they had to go back to and had to live, and live them on the same level, and driving through on the same high common momentum of purpose, live them daily together. ”

“ When people, accustomed to isolated lives, are brought into daily intercourse with one another and with other people, when their work, until then performed along traditional lines, is suddenly performed in new and unaccustomed ways, when their interests, until then strictly personal, are thrust forward to mingle with social interests, a revolution in the thoughts and habits of these people is bound to follow. ”

“ Those few individual spirits who lived in isolation and wished for social regeneration have sought it bit by bit; they have sought one another out, beckoned to each other, approached one another, united, understood one another and formed a group, a centre of attraction towards which other souls now fly from the four corners of the earth, just as larks fly towards a mirror. ”

“ Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank. Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. ”

“ All culture, in whatever line, must pass through these two stages of estrangement and of reunion; the reunion being not of two different things, but the recognition of itself by thought, and its acceptance of itself as itself. ”

“ We may extend the social circle in which we move—a circle perhaps narrowed and restricted through circumstances beyond our control—by making intimate acquaintances, perhaps even close friends, among a society long departed, but which, when we have once learnt the trick of it, it rests with us to revive. ”

“ There are passions and dispositions so unequivocally bad, that even indifference itself is roused to oppose them; but when the current of nature and the course of duty seem to run parallel, we suffer ourselves to be borne away by the stream, and are seldom sufficiently watchful to ascertain whether the parallelism be alike exact in every stage of our progress. ”

“ Thus did the First Book of my life come to an end with these chapters of union, separation and reunion. Or, rather, it is not true to say it has come to an end. The same subject has still to be continued through more elaborate solutions of worse complexities, to a greater conclusion. Each one comes here to finish but one book of life, which, during the progress of its various parts, grows spiral-wise on an ever-increasing radius. ”

“ When we enter into this union, He is, as never before, the Life within us, and how shall we seek to suppress the Life that has entered in to displace our own old self-life, and to manifest Himself in and through us, in whatever way He wills. ”

“ Our mutual love of literature, want of fortune, and indifference to the society of those whose minds were wholly uncultivated, served to cement a union between us, which was interrupted only by the removal of the parties to distant places, and dissolved only by their death. ”

“ Humbling and sad as is this admission, still we must make it: imperceptible elements of the great social organization appearing upon this earth as living beings, fragments of matter agitated by a spirit, we are born, we live, and we die, unconscious of our destiny, playing our part without any precise notion of the end, and in the midst of the darkness which covers our origin and our end, having only one consolation—the love of our fellow-man. ”

“ Everywhere, with a mysterious individual difference, we see youth growing to adolescence and the interplay of love, desire, curiosities, passionate impulses, rivalries. As the earth spins from darkness into the light, the millions wake again to a new day in their life of toil, anxiety, little satisfactions, little chagrins, rivalries, spites, generosities. ”

“ The many are almost ready to grasp the great unifying conception. This is the next step for the human family as a whole; this the present planetary brooding. Much we have suffered from identifying ourselves with parts. Rivalries, boundaries, jealousies, wars—all have to do with the making of parts. Beauty, harmony, peace and brotherhood have to do with the assembly of parts into one. That which is good for the many is good for the one; and that which is good for the one is good for the many—the instant we leave the part and conceive the whole. ”

“ Yet to-night, perhaps because the sense of loss of a dear and necessary presence accents my own loneliness, I can visualize another type of home—the home of Bernoline—and wonder.... After all, there is something that touches the heart strings in the thought of the generations succeeding each other, standing for the same ideal of conduct, the same loyalty to a conception of state and faith, passing down the same standard from father and son and guarding it in reverence! ”

“ Would each act on the other at all, to modify its peculiarities and broaden its view of life? To take another simile, would such a vein of molten, fiery, nineteenth century individuality, operating vertically, do other than shatter the superincumbent, horizontal social beds? ”

“ How can you believe—you, a man of solitude and poesy—the horrors of social life? Ah! you little think when you invent your dramas that they are far surpassed by those that are played in families apparently united. ”

“ He, in his freshness, imagines that to present human beings to each other is his mission in this world and moves through life making these platonic unions, oblivious, as are other match-makers, of the misery he creates. ”

“ Societies, organisations, ceremonies, forms, authority, dogma—they are all outside; silently and secretly, in the solitude of one's heart, must the lonely path be found; but the slender track once beneath our feet, all the complicated relations of the world become clear and simple. ”

“ Our social intercourse, as commonly managed, is a mere semblance of the reality sought. What is it that we want? Some sympathetic converse with our fellow-creatures: some converse that shall not be mere dead words, but the vehicle of living thoughts and feelings—converse in which the eyes and the face shall speak, and the tones of the voice be full of meaning—converse which shall make us feel no longer alone, but shall draw us closer to another, and double our own emotions by adding another's to them. ”

“ And the next most natural and fruitful movement after such a personal discovery of abiding Reality, such a transfiguration of life, is always back towards our fellow-men; to learn more from them, to unite with them, to help them,—anyhow to reaffirm our solidarity with them. ”

“ Such is the tragic necessity which strict science finds underneath our domestic and neighborly life, irresistibly driving each adult soul as with whips into the desert, and making our warm covenants sentimental and momentary. ”

“ And universal art, by uniting the most different people in one common feeling, by destroying separation, will educate people to union, will show them, not by reason, but by life itself, the joy of universal union reaching beyond the bounds set by life. ”

“ In spite of all the complexity of our social life, and the endless connections we form with others, there is as the ultimate fact a great and almost weird solitude. We may fill up our hearts with human fellowship in all its grades, yet there remains to each a distinct and separated life.
We speak vaguely of the mass of men, but the mass consists of units, each with his own life, a thing apart. The community of human life is being emphasized to-day, and it is a lesson which bears and needs repetition, the lesson of our common ties and common duties. ”

“ Are the destinies of all human beings parallel? Answer—No. On earth there are seven distinct orders of mankind, and so there is beyond it. It is difficult to name these last without resorting to Oriental terms ”

“ Just so must I learn my relation to society by coming into contact with a wide range of experiences, of people, by cultivating and deepening my sympathy and whole understanding of life.
When we have come together and got acquainted with one another, then we shall have an opportunity for learning the rules of the game—the game of association which is the game of life. Certain organizations have sprung up since 1914 with the avowed object of fighting war with love. If only we knew how to love! ”

“ The many small, isolated communities, in which life presented so much of common interest and welfare; the many mutual contests and feuds, which of necessity soon sprang up between these proud, ambitious and warlike men, and which rapidly spread from the individual to the family, naturally enough led to the preservation of the memory both of the events and of the persons concerned. ”

“ This is hence a peculiar race, bound together, not by ties of birth and family, only by community of interest, of hope, of suffering. As in the world of mediæval story here are neither old people nor young children, only the vigorous, ready for battle. ”

“ New modes of life, and altered manners during a lengthened peace, brought men into closer observation of each other; the ranks in society were no longer insulated; their haunts were the same localities, the playhouse, the ordinary, and Paul’s Walk. ”

“ All the accumulated effect of these is seen in our habits of thinking, our modes of living. But we cannot rest in the common. The surge of life sweeps through the given similarity, the common ground, and breaks it up into a thousand differences. This tumultuous, irresistible flow of life is our existence: the unity, the common, is but for an instant, it flows on to new differings which adjust themselves anew in fuller, more varied, richer synthesis. The moment when similarity achieves itself as a composite of working, seething forces, it throws out its myriad new differings. ”

“ We have, in fact, to “pull ourselves together,” as the phrase goes, and make an end to all this slack, extravagant living, this spectacle of pleasure, that has been spreading and intensifying in every civilised community for the last three or four decades. ”

“ Satisfied now with the amusements of the evening and the pleasures of the day, we parted from one another, filled with quite different sentiments from those which had possessed us in the morning. Do members of this great human family ever meet each other in social converse, and freely open their hearts, without a new and better strength being given to the bonds which hold in their embrace the peace and happiness of society? ”

“ As in all great revolutions which transform and remake the inner life of a being, many new habits were formed by him in the three years of solitude and abandonment, singular habits different and contradictory to each other. ”

“ They are deeper than can be told, and belong to the immensities and eternities. They reach down to that depth where society itself originates and disappears,—where the question is, Which is first, man or men?—where the individual is lost in his source. ”

“ The delights of dissipation in the society of thoughtless, undedicated companions allure her from the path where gleams the pure, white light of art. As she turns, thinking to live only for a little hour with her companions, the gates of the lighted realm, where few enter, close behind her. ”

“ The co–operation is involuntary, and is put upon us by the Genius of Life, who reserves this as a part of his prerogative. 'T is fine for us to talk; we sit and muse, and are serene and complete; but the moment we meet with anybody, each becomes a fraction. ”

“ Here were people of all sorts talking about things that were interesting, that revealed to her things that she had never dreamed of before with regard to the vital common interests of persons whom she had always thought unlike herself, so that the community of the human heart was revealed to her, the singleness of human life. ”

“ Whether the disembodied souls left their bodies in the north or in the south, they will all rejoice in the society of each other. The spirits of the patriarchs of old, as well as of those who die to-day in the Lord, will meet in one large community. Console thyself, therefore, with the thought of a future, joyful, and eternal re-union; and let that consolation be also an active precept, teaching thee so to order thy daily conversation as to complete thy fitness for that re-union. ”