Weltschmerz

“ What sudden, unexpected touches of pathos in him!—bearing witness how the sorrow of humanity, the Weltschmerz, the constant aching of its wounds, is ever present with him: but what a gift also for the enjoyment of life in its subtleties, of enjoyment actually refined by the need of some thoughtful economies and making the most of things! Little arts of happiness he is ready to teach to others. ”

“ And thus disease, everywhere, produces sorrow and wretchedness. The air is filled with the shrieks and groans of the suffering. The very sounds of nature are plaintive and mournful. Every breeze that sweeps over the plains, has its tale of pain and anguish. Every wind, in melancholy tones, wails out its agonizing report of disaster and of death. Even in the gentlest gales, we may hear the groans of infants, the shrieks of convulsed children, the moans of agonized men, the throes of distressed and dying woman, and all the various notes of misery with which earth is filled. ”

“ But after all life is but a span, "an inch or two of time," hung upon a slender cord that is momentarily in danger of breaking and in the end-the inevitable end-sure to be cut asunder by the ever-busy hand of man's universal enemy, the dread of all mankind - Death, Death, pitiless, cruel and relentless Death. Sickness, sorrow, pain and death are realities alike in the experience of young and old, rich and poor, great and small, in every land and in every clime. ”

“ All low desires submerged and in an ecstasy that was not joy but perfect clarity he saw the misery and sorrow of the world, sounding its deeps of agony and loss, the ruin wrought by age, disease, and death,—the hopeless dark beyond. ”

“ I looked round on a bleak and cheerless region, and forward on a life as barren of human joy, made up of every species of suffering,—hunger, cold, fatigue, insult, torture,—liable to be cut short at any moment by the caprice of my tormentors, and so wretched that death itself, with all the enormities of cannibalism, lost its terrors by comparison. Life, for any good or great purposes to be achieved, was over. ”

“ Think of 'all the misery that is done under the sun!' If it could be made visible, what a dark pall would swathe the world, an atmosphere of sorrow rolling ever with it through space. The sight is too sad to be seen by any but by Him who cures it all, and it wrung from His heart the sigh with which ere He cured one poor sufferer—a drop in the ocean—He looked up to heaven, as in mute appeal against all these heaped miseries of suffering man. ”

“ Oh, the agony, the sorrow! Pains of the wounded body, quivering flesh, rotting away in life. The silent torture of hearts under gnawing grief. Children whom no one loves, poor hopeless girls, women seduced or betrayed, men deceived in their friends, their loves, their faith, the pitiable herd of the unfortunates whom life has broken and forgotten!... Not poverty and sickness were the most frightful things to see, but the cruelty of men one to another. ”

“ Finally, it is the general aim of these addresses to bring courage and hope to the suffering, to proclaim joy in the midst of deep sorrow, to lead us gently and softly through the hour of deep affliction. This age is to me as a shade that stands weeping over its own corpse, from which it has been driven forth by a host of diseases, unable to tear its gaze from the form so beloved of old, and trying in despair every means to enter again the home of pestilence. ”

“ And all the human sorrow of disease that finds no obstacles or contrasts, of the disease that ruins, that tortures, that whips, that slays, since its companion is misery, all the human sorrow of hundreds of thousands of sufferers who were perishing without succour, medicine and food, in narrow death-dealing houses, on hard beds of cold and want—all this inconsolable, disconsolate human suffering was reviewed in the calm, firm words of Karl Ehbehard, shone from his glance, and flowed from his voice. ”

“ Too well those golden shores recall the wail of women and the yelling curses of men, driven, beast-fashion, to their pen, and floated from home to hell, or,—happier fate!—dragged up, in terror of pursuit, and thrown overboard, a brief agony for a long one. They know them, too, whose continual cry of separation, starvation, insult, agony, and death rises from the heart of freedom like the steam of a great pestilence,—Pity them, hearts of flesh! pity also the captors,—the Sphinx children, the flint-hearts! pity those who cannot feel, far beyond those who can,—though it be but to suffer! ”

“ Besides if nature loved brutality and inhumanity and suffering why should any atom of it wish to escape pain, and why in those atoms should it generate sympathy and tears and rejoicing at escape from suffering by man, why sorrow and horror at the accidental or intentional infliction of disaster on man by nature or man? ”

“ The drifting spirit, worn with sorrow, doubt, and self-conflict, longed to be at peace—longed for a refuge equally from the evils and tortures of its own condition and the storms and perils of the world. ”

“ When he fell ill he suddenly lost the well-regulated world and found himself in the chaos of an overmastering dream, a sea of blood and fire; the world was out of joint; everywhere conflagration, volcanic outbreaks, earthquakes, mountains fell in, followed by enormous battles where the peoples fell upon one another; he became involved more and more in the battle of nature, he was right in the midst of those fighting, wrestling, defending himself, enduring unutterable misery and pain ”

“ I can say only that no combination of suffering possible to individual being could be likened to such pain,—the pain of countless lives interwoven. It seemed as if every nerve of me had been prolonged into some monstrous web of sentiency spun back through a million years,—and as if the whole of that measureless woof and warp, over all its shivering threads, were pouring into my consciousness, out of the abysmal past, some ghastliness without name,—some horror too vast for human brain to hold. ”

“ No circle in any hell would have contained more concentrated suffering than was crowded into his every conscious moment—horrible, brute, physical suffering, tearing at every nerve, suffering that degraded him, that left him no humanity. ”

“ Can there be peace in a world wherein we can never escape these sad, terrible, discordant sounds? The words that I have repeated were spoken in just such a world when the din of evil was at its worst, and to those who must soon suffer all the wrong that the world could inflict."
After a brief pause of silent waiting she continued:
"But is the turmoil of the world a far-away sound, like the sullen roar of angry waves beating on a shore that rises high and enduring, securing us safety and rest? Beyond the deep disquietude of the world at large is the deeper unrest of the human heart. ”

“ A melancholy spectacle, indeed, was it to behold an entire population so steeped in misery, so utterly inured to wretchedness, that they felt no shame at its exposure, but rather a sort of self-exultation at any opportunity of displaying a more than ordinary amount of human suffering and sorrow;—to hear them how they caressed their afflictions, how they seemed to fondle their misfortunes, vying with each other in calamity, and bidding higher and higher for a little human sympathy. ”

“ Stricken by his dreadful malady, the lamentable effects of which a cruel and unfeeling world so often ridicule and despise, and constantly tearing open the wound it has occasioned, the afflicted spirit flies from every scene of social joy and animating pleasure, seeks as a sole resource, to hide its sorrows in solitary seclusion, and awaits, in lingering sufferance, the stroke of death. ”

“ It seems sometimes as if the torch of civilization had been almost extinguished in this deluge of blood. This darkening of the face of the earth has cost more than the blood and treasure of the race—it has involved a terrific strain on the mind and soul of man. ”

“ What effect has this fear or terror of God upon man, when through a life of ignorance he violates the system of Nature, and brings misery upon self as its centre? One tear dropped upon the bed of dissolution appeases the anger of his imaginary deity. But what is the effect of this terror upon nations? These when they agitate with the dreadful concussion of war, the holy chain of the sympathy of Nature, they call it an appeal to God, and make the phantom of their imagination an apology for cruelty and destruction. ”

“ Then, then the pain—the infinity of feeling—
Words fail to paint its anguish. Reason, reeling,
Staggered with torture through his burning brain,
While his teeth gnashed with bitterness and pain;
Reflection grew a scorpion, speech had fled,
And all but madness and despair were dead.
XXI. He slept to dream of death, or worse than death;
For death were bliss, and the convulsive wrath
Of living torture peace, to the dread weight
That pressed upon sensation, while the light
Of reason gleamed but horror, and strange hosts
Of hideous phantasies, like threatening ghosts. ”

“ All that the human race has suffered in war and want, in pestilence and famine, in fire and flood,—all the pangs and pains of every disease and every death—all this is as nothing compared with the agonies to be endured by one lost soul. ”

“ There are the common miseries of life, which bring their measure of soul-sickness, and plead for healing. This earth is a charnel-house, filled with the diseased and suffering. The griefs and the pangs of the wretched issue forth continually from palaces, and huts, and alms-houses, and hospitals, in all the lands of earth. ”

“ As if some destiny were pacing upon it with heavy tread.
Perchance all is being changed!
I fain would see in a rose-hued radiance
The joys of men and their hopes,
And be healed and with a free spirit,
O, fain would I live
Or be dead
Or else depart
To distant regions!
O, fain would I be happier!
Amid turmoil a new day is being born,
A great matter is approaching with dire tread,
O, would that I were liberated!
Would that the curse were removed from me,
That I may not be damned!
With strange turmoil the earth is tossing;
With heavy tread something paces hither ”

“ In the greater world beyond my consulting-room door life went on undisturbed by any thought of the approaching upheaval, full of the old tragedies of ambition and love and sickness. But sometimes as I examined my patients and listened to their tales of suffering and pain, a curious contraction of the heart would come upon me at the thought that perhaps some day, not so very far remote, all the endless cycle of disease and misery would cease, and a new dawn of hope burst with blinding radiance upon weary humanity. ”

“ Here the long train of evils that attach themselves to the best phases of humanity fade to silent dust. Here the thorn-crown of pain is loosened from the brow of sorrow by the white hand of peace, and the hearts that were all their lifetime bowed under the shadow of a great and haply unpitied affliction, never ache any more. ”

“ The golden sun shines down on endless sorrow and misery, and over beyond the blue mountains is nothing but the toilsome road from the cradle to the grave, the long route we diversify with so much strife and hatred. ”

“ Pestilence, heat and cold, ignorance, famine and anger, these things shall grip their claws upon all men as heretofore in fields and roads and cities but shall not hold thee. But from thy soul, sitting in the old worn track of the worlds when all is gone away, shall fall off the shackles of circumstance and thou shalt dream thy dreams alone. ”

“ Sitting there in the dark and the cold, he grew barely conscious of his own pain. This is Nature’s mercy. When the wound is beyond bearing she draws away the sufferer’s consciousness, and an extremity of agony brings its own relief, if only for a little while. ”

“ In the world to come, whatsoever it is, There is no more earthly ill-doing— For the dusty darkness shall slay desire, And the chaff may burn with unquenchable fire, But for green wild growth of thistle and briar At least there is no renewing. And this grievous burden of life shall change In the dim hereafter, dreamy and strange, And sorrows and joys diurnal. And partial blessings and perishing ills Shall fade in the praise, or the pang that fills The glory of God's eternal hills, Or the gloom of His gulf eternal. ”

“ You know that human misery has been crowded there in masses, without air to breathe, or such light as God gives to his meanest animal. You think of this till the hollows of the mountains seem gorged with groans, and the cry of suffering souls comes up through the very pores of the earth, making the wild flowers tremble beneath the doleful misery that grew desperate beneath their roots. ”

“ Physical crises are transformed into catastrophes of the soul, and the pressure of the blood and its beating waves are spiritualized into the soft melancholy and sweet dreams from which his verses rise like tender buds. ”

“ Alternate hopes and fears distract my mind, My weary soul no rest can find. My busy fancy now presents A gracious scene: my son repents And God recalls his doom. Now to false shame he quits his fears, False courage takes, and madly dares His impious feast resume. Then arms and dying groans resound, And streams of blood gush out around. Alternate hopes and fears distract my mind, My weary soul no rest can find. ”

“ From evil free, and labor's galling load;
Free from diseases that; with racking rage,
Precipitate the pale decline of age.
Now swift the days of manhood haste away,
And misery's pressure turns the temples gray.
The Woman's hands an ample casket bear;
She lifts the lid—she scatters ill in air.
Hope sole remained within, nor took her flight—
Beneath the vessel's verge concealed from light;
Issued the rest, in quick dispersion buried,
And woes innumerous roamed the breathing world:
With ills the land is full, with ills the sea;
Diseases haunt our frail humanity ”