Dimity

“ That dimness which spreads itself over the world at nightfall, wrapping it up as in a vaporous shroud, has a mystic power over our nature. That clear obscure mistiness seems to open to the mind's eye the distant depths of borderland; we almost fancy we can see dim, shadowy figures float past before us. ”

“ When, from within or from without, some dark vapor has risen up, clouding the sunlight, and casting the soul into darkness--when remorse, or despair, or bitter disappointment, or satiety, or the dark pall of grief, has overshadowed all things, and left us in a sort of twilight, where we see every surrounding object in gloom, we bless the gale, even though it be violent, that arises to sweep the tempest-cloud from our sky. ”

“ There is something depressing in being called while it is still dark, and being obliged to dress by artificial light. As I laced my boots by the flame of the candle in the dusk before the dawn, I felt a sensation I used to experience at school, when they lit the class-room gas in the early twilight of a winter afternoon—a sensation of the sadness and futility of all things. ”

“ Beheld by the dim and shifting light of a few candles, these painted horrors assume an aspect of ghastly reality. They start into life as we pass, then drop behind us into darkness. That darkness alone is awful. ”

“ And following of wind
Through the dim avenues and deep
Abysses of the mind ;
When will our ears be deaf at last,
When will our eyes be blind ?
Oh vanity of vanities
And lighter than the air. ”

“ From that night for six months, darkness always brought the most horrible fancies, and opticular and auricular or acoustical delusions of a frightful nature, so vivid and real that instead of a blessing, sleep became a curse, and the hours of darkness became hours which seemed days of misery. ”

“ The whirlwind raged on in the night,
It howled by the windows, it shrieked at the door,
The terrified servants with horror it filled,
The thought of the demon as never before;
The spiritual world with its weal and its woe,
Seemed near them; they trembled to think they might see
The form of some being no more of this world,
And seeing be powerless even to flee. ”

“ Lying in this place at night, in those hours of darkness and stillness when the surrounding atmosphere of human misery presses heavy on me in my heavy sleep, prophecies of dread things to come between us, trouble my spirit in dreams. ”

“ Out of the shadows which shift with the sun, forms seem crawling and phantoms appear to glide, and we are in a fever almost from the horrible illusions of fancy. We breathe quickly and fear to speak, for the smallest vibration in the silence would jar on our nerves. ”

“ Now, not only are they closed in silence, but a horror seems to enwrap all creation. The sun, obscured by no earth-born cloud, gives out no spark nor ray of light; and in that solemn darkness every voice is strangely hushed. ”

“ To ourselves, sleeping and waking there, behind the rainbow, there is no beauty in the house; only a chill damp mist in every room, and, over all, a haunting fear of the hour when the gilded clouds will melt away, and let us fall—somewhat heavily, no doubt—upon the hard world underneath. ”

“ Over the earth the shadows creep with deepening gloom, wrapping all objects in a mysterious dimness, in which all certainty is destroyed and any guess seems plausible. Forms lose their outlines, and are dissolved in floating mist. The day is over, the night draws on. ”

“ Unconscious of our own motion from any direct impression upon our own feelings, the whole world appeared to be in the act of receding from us in the dim vista of infinite space; while the vapoury curtain seemed to congregate on all sides and cover the retreating masses from our view. ”

“ One disagreeable result of whispering is that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence, haunted by the ghosts of sound—strange cracks and tickings, the rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow. ”

“ But, secretly, I was struck with awe at the revelation of powers so unsearchably new, lurking within old affections so familiarly known as cold. Upon the analogy of this case, it might be thought that nothing whatever had yet been truly and seriously felt by man; nothing searched or probed by human sensibilities, to a depth below the surface. If cold could give out mysteries of suffering so novel, all things in the world might be yet unvisited by the truth of human sensations. ”

“ Oh, the cold, quiet night, when speech is not and sleep has forgotten us! when all the doubts and fears and jealousies that in the blessed daylight slumber, rise up to torture us when even the half-suspected sneer, the covert neglect, that some hours ago were but as faintest pin-pricks, now gall and madden as a poisoned thrust! ”

“ These night damps, this sickly and chilling air, heavy with the rank vapours of the coming morning, are not suited to thoughts and toils which are alone sufficient to sear your mind and exhaust your strength. ”

“ And as I sit there with eyes fixed on that luminous space, I feel that something else, also terrible, is about to happen. Surely some one is moving in the darkness behind us? Even in that black silence I am conscious of a shadow blacker still. ”

“ In other parts, all things would verily be frightful and stark with extreme cold; whence all high places would be very rough, unfruitful, inaccessible, covered with a pall of perpetual shades and eternal night. ”

“ But at night, when he sits down in a little room where the air reeks with the vapor of his neighbor’s breath and the smoke of kerosene lamps, he finds himself suddenly dull and drowsy,—without emotion, without thought, without feeling,—and he rises and reproaches himself for this state of things. ”

“ No shadows! Nothing real! No assurance of reality! only the dark—unbroken, formless, fearful; the dark which like grief, and forgetfulness, and selfishness, fives for itself only, without regard for the pain or joy or suffering of others; all the world else shut out; a fearful, shadowless thing in which all the beautiful realities of life are lost and blotted out. ”

“ In the resonant darkness you hear the dismal uproar circling above the houses sometimes for a long while; and as you can see nothing, you feel, in spite of yourself, a sort of dread and a sympathetic uneasiness until the sobbing flock has passed out of hearing in space. ”

“ They mark time in my spirit’s flawed action. I begin each day with a Damn of sorts. I end each day with a Damn of sorts. At midday sometimes it’s, ‘Damn the terrifying ignorance of people.’ In the dusk a deep-felt Damn of the blood. ”

“ A few bare- footed people moved by in silence, and the brown monotony, the comforting warmth of the hot midday sun, and the quivering heat-rays in the air, soon gave an eerie, unreal look to things, a strange, hazy, hypnotic effect, a sense of dreamy spell. ”

“ Why does everything within you turn upon me eyes full of yearning? Even at this moment, as I stand dumbly, fixedly, perplexedly contemplating your vastness, a menacing cloud, charged with gathering rain, seems to overshadow my head. ”

“ From the darkness of the night we could scarcely discern the dim outline of its lofty walls and ponderous gates, as they swung open, grating upon their hinges, to engulf a fresh supply of misery within that sepulchre of the living. ”

“ The soft desire of one cold, paleface: lo,
Close-pressed sweet lips, and eyes of violet,
That are filled up as with a sudden fear—
A storm's prelude upon the expectant mere.
Yet deep behind what never they forget,
Who ever see in life's chance or mischance. ”

“ Thus did we cast ourselves down—as the dreary shades of night came over us, with a deeper and drearier cloud than ever,—not seeking sleep, but seized upon by it, as it were, to save us from the suffering, akin to madness, which must haply follow upon our fearful waking thoughts. ”

“ But up I came, the darkness got denser (I went so fast) ; it was vibrating, the dense agony vibrated faster; I was quivering, struggling, kicking out; everything was a convulsion of torture, my head seemed to come to the surface, a glimpse of light and air broke on the darkness, voices came through to me, and words ”

“ Like a thick miasmic cloud, as we read this great pagan critic, all the fogs and vapours of turgid hyperborean superstition are driven away from the face of the warm sun. Once more what is permanent and interesting in this mad complicated comedy of human life emerges in bold and sharp relief. ”

“ Punctual, commonplace, keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in a dream. ”

“ At first the darkness appeared to be absolutely pitchy, but in a few minutes our eyes became so far accustomed to it that we could just make out each other’s presence—very dimly and vaguely, it is true. ”

“ Not the greyness, or dullness, that heralds a change of weather, but that of tired burned-out nature, waking unrefreshed from her night's sleep. All night long Nature has tossed in troubled dreams, and now wakes to life, haunted by a vague wild feeling of oppression ”

“ It soon began to get dark, a strong wind began to blow, and a voice was heard singing outside:
"Wanderer! outcast, forsaken!
Whom the night has overtaken;
If no crime your conscience stain,
Here this night you may remain." ”

“ You feel awful, like a vacuum, with a pressure on you, a sort of pressure of darkness, and you yourself—just nothing, a vacuum—that’s what it’s like a little vacuum that’s not dark, all loose in the middle of a space of darkness, that’s pressing on you. ”

“ That shadowy form, standing in the air, now vanishing, and then reappearing with every flash of sunlight, seemed no inapt image of human life, a thing of shadow, floating in a cloud, and hovering over an abyss! ”

“ With its own patient and victorious presence, cleaving daily through cloud after cloud, and reappearing still through the tempest drift, lofty and serene amidst the passing rents of blue, it seems partly to rebuke, and partly to guard, and partly to calm and chasten, the agitations of the feeble human soul that watches it ”

“ To such extremes has this faculty, when distorted, hurried its unhappy subjects, that they have endured the severest mortification, denied themselves the common benefits of nature, exposed themselves to the keenest edge of winter’s cold, and the most scorching rays of summer’s heat, and indulged their distempered fancies in the wildest chimeras. ”

“ Thoughtful men, looking ten years ahead, saw the cloud, which even now was threatening enough, grow blacker and blacker, and shuddered at the thought of the tempest which before long must break over the land. ”

“ Thus in sleep, in a fever, in madness, or in any very violent emotions of soul, our ideas may approach to our impressions; as, on the other hand, it sometimes happens, that our impressions are so faint and low that we cannot distinguish them from our ideas. ”

“ The wind at times would sigh and sob so mournfully, like a human voice, that her imagination peopled the darkness with strange creatures in distress, and then she would shudder as a more violent gust raised the prolonged wail into a loud shriek. ”

“ The sparkling fog is mind stuff.
I will not defend that statement. I will not rationalize it. But I will seek explanations; consider possibilities.
Known: This sparkling fog through which we drift is intelligent matter; the stuff of thoughts; the basic material from which consciousness springs. It is consciousness itself. ”

“ Mere wind they are not, but foul, black, blinding smoke. And writings of this description are published or republished in great quantities to the present day. And people read them, and fill themselves with wind and filthy fumes, and wrap themselves in smoky, pitchy clouds, and go through the world in a spiritual darkness thick enough to be felt. ”

“ Still the room was hot and stifling, the darkness affected the coolest imagination, and straining one's eyes and ears for spiritual manifestations produced a not unnatural feeling of uneasiness in the mind. ”