Disenchantment

“ The instincts that are within us are but the different forms beneath which this unreasoning desire to live is at work, and with which the Unconscious inspires man and moulds him to its profit. Hence the energy so foolishly expended for the protection of an existence which is but the right to suffer, hence the erroneous idea which is formed of the pain and pleasure derivable from life, and hence the modification of past disenchantments through the influence of fresh and newer hopes. ”

“ The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment—often of remorse. ”

“ Certain meetings, certain things half perceived, or surmised, certain secret sorrows, certain tricks of fate which awake in us a whole world of painful thoughts, which suddenly unclose to us the mysterious door of moral suffering, complicated, incurable; all the deeper because they appear benign, all the more bitter because they are intangible, all the more tenacious because they appear almost factitious, leave in our souls a sort of trail of sadness, a taste of bitterness, a feeling of disenchantment, from which it takes a long time to free ourselves. ”

“ Work, torment, pain, and misery are held to be the unavoidable lot of nearly every one, and the work, torment, pain, and misery of life are considered as necessary to mankind as the keel to the ship. Indeed, were it otherwise, were wishes, when formed, fulfilled, in what manner would the time be employed? ”

“ At this moment of his life, with all the repose, and sometimes even the high ceremony, on the surface, he was a being formed for high-reaching exploits, ready to dare everything and reckless of all consequences, if he proposed to himself an object which he believed to be just and great. ”

“ The degrees of sensitiveness, however, and the ability or inability to support suffering, vary admittedly with the individual. There are men who rise from an insult refreshed; there are many to whom an injury is a tonic and pain a stimulant; and there is even a greater number whose sensibilities are so dull that what is torture to another is barely a twinge to them. ”

“ When it does appear, it is, as a rule, presented by such thinkers as have been mentioned in the course of these pages, who, through their assertion of the undeniable awake the dislike and animosity of those who have not yet had their fill of proceedings in bankruptcy, and still hope to find life a pleasant thing well worth the living. ”

“ In stating that this view of life is of distinctly modern origin, it should be understood that it is so only in the systematic form which it has recently assumed, for individual expressions of discontent have been handed down from remote ages, and any one who cared to rummage through the dust-bins of literature would find material enough to compile a dictionary of pessimistic quotation. ”

“ The question, then, as to whether life is valuable, valueless, or an affliction can, with regard to the individual, be answered only after a consideration of the different circumstances attendant on each particular case; but, broadly speaking, and disregarding its necessary exceptions, life may be said to be always valuable to the obtuse, often valueless to the sensitive; while to him who commiserates with all mankind, and sympathizes with everything that is, life never appears otherwise than as an immense and terrible affliction. ”

“ Historically speaking, therefore, the progress of civilization corresponds with the spread of general nausea. ”

“ This devilish obstinacy, I would like to meet with obstinacy as fiendship. Then it for the first time struck me, even if this wonderful fortune occurred to me, what a beggarly return it would be—just thirty-five pieces, which would not near indemnify. A devilish obstinacy, I said again. I felt a sort of rage, and fury as devilish, and as I say an obstinacy, that would have made me put down everything, take a knife, gash my arm, let the blood stream out on their cursed board, if they wanted that! A soul's eternal fate—they would not care, for it is not to be made into money. ”

“ His person was now almost as changed as his fate: it was worn away by suffering, by fatigue, by internal conflicts, and faded by its exposure to the varying clime; the experience of human frailty in himself, and of human turpitude in others, marked his brow with traces of distrust and disappointment;—his enthusiasm was fled! his zeal subdued by the fatal consequences of its unsuccessful efforts! and love, and affliction, and shame, and indignation, the opprobrium he endured, and the innocence he could not establish ”

“ Why am I called upon to do this, oh cruel, most cruel destiny? Cannot I fly from the horrid scene? Cannot I rather run a dagger into my heart? But no, 'tis plain my fate is ordained, sealed, fixed! and in vain I struggle,—I must fulfil the task appointed for me! ”

“ But the great mass of seeming contentment is real discontent, combined with indolence or self-indulgence, which, while taking no legitimate means of raising itself, delights in bringing others down to its own level. ”

“ Knowing that 'due decorum's' breach foulest disgrace will cause.
Those firm in mind will not slacken in their observance of the proprieties of life, knowing, as they do, the misery that flows from the transgression from them. ”

“ I've been pretty sick, Plank. It tires a man out; a man's head and shoulders get tired. Oh, I don't mean the usual reaction from self-contempt, disgust—the dreadful, aching sadness of it all which lasts even while desire, stunned for the moment, wakens into craving. ”

“ Only the hopeless suppression of natural desires, the conflict through years of ardent youth with sordid circumstances, could have brought him to the pass he had now reached—one of desperation centred in self. ”

“ Without any means to provide himself with food or clothing, with a mind borne down with trouble and suffering, and bereft of every hope from which the slightest consolation might be derived, the once honest man was driven to a career of desperation and crime which, if given in its details, would cause the blood-thirsty tales of the yellow-covered trash to pale for their very puerility and tameness. ”

“ In many ways they were wiser: they knew that the insatiability of desire that made one propelled to breed, work, and buy was not going to stop. They knew that no one in such circles was going to find contentment. They were all going to fail miserably. They knew that there was a deep discontent in the human psyche that yearned for destruction and death. ”

“ If you had asked me honourably for the money and then lost it through some misfortune, I would have died sooner than have reproached you by a word or a tear. But I must despise the only human being in the world upon whom I have any claim. All that I have is lost through crime, and this passes my endurance. You know well what depends upon the shining bits of metal of which you have robbed me--freedom of thought and action,--the noblest possessions that life can give. ”

“ I ridiculed my compunctions and my sickly conscience, my oversensitive imagination, and my groping after futility. I hated everything I was and everything I had done that had brought me to this living bankruptcy. I broke into a laugh—a laugh of contempt and derision at myself—flung into my things and went riotously into the night, seeking some befuddling oblivion,—some sudden end of this martyrdom of discipline—and, after a quarter of an hour’s blind wandering, I turned abruptly into an open chapel and down on my knees, there to remain inertly until the frenzy had spent itself! ”

“ Hardened and impenitent sinner! the measure of your iniquity is full: the 321 price of crime has been paid: here shall your spirit dwell for ever, and for ever. You have dreamed away life’s joyous hour, nor made atonement for error, nor denied yourself aught that the fair earth presented you. ”

“ Perhaps, on the other hand, you have knocked about in the world and lost your "faith"; you have been cheated and exploited, and have set out to "get yours," as the phrase is; to "feather your own nest." But some gust of passion seizes you, and you waste your substance, you wreck your life ”

“ They demonstrate, as with the physical accuracy of the dissector’s scalpel, the same selfishnesses and superstitions and weaknesses and impulses of lust and cowardice and greed, multiplying to-day as yesterday. ”

“ Charnel-houses of sin and lust—sloughs of despond and regret—excess of passion offset by lack of power—dread, despair, hopelessness, shame and desperation, making a picture of misery scarcely to be conceived by any but those unfortunate beings who in the thoughtless, careless heyday of youth, or the reckless reliance on more mature vigor, have weakened, emasculated and enslaved themselves by indulgences and excesses that have borne fruit of misery, disease and desperation in after years. ”

“ Why are we not heavenly bodies, void of desire, pure and ethereal? Why are we born of dust, why do we cleave to dust, eat dust and return to dust when we have thrown off this great fraud of life? The great fraud of my life I will write down here--the fraud towards myself--towards you, and towards a third as well, who was pure and good--and who yet was the cause of it all. ”

“ I repeat, this depressing and infectious instinct thwarts those instincts which aim at the preservation and enhancement of the value life: by multiplying misery quite as much as by preserving all that is miserable, it is the principal agent in promoting decadence,—pity exhorts people to nothing, to nonentity! ”

“ Besides, to name a very small income will be to conjure up before his eyes the picture of a mean, pitiful, sordid existence, from which she feels, with painful distinctness, he would turn with disgust. ”

“ There is no resonance in this analysis, but all Dissonance.
Something lives, lives muscularly in me that constantly betrays me, destroys me against all my own convictions, against all my own knowledge, against all my own desire. ”

“ But I often parted with money against my inclination, either because I wanted the resolution to refuse, or dreaded the appellation of a niggardly fellow; and I may be truly said to have squandered my estate, without honour, without friends, and without pleasure. The last may, perhaps, appear strange to men unacquainted with the masquerade of life: I deceived others, and I endeavoured to deceive myself; and have worn the face of pleasantry and gaiety, while my heart suffered the most exquisite torture. ”

“ When I call to mind the toil and wearisomeness of your avocations, and think how you sacrifice your amusements and your health; when I recollect your habitual and self-forgetting economy, how generously severe, my soul sickens at its own guilt. ”

“ A system of waste, in trifles, that does not add anything substantial to your happiness and certainly lays the foundation for a vast amount of disquietude, and almost certain embarrassment in money affairs, and consequent humiliations. ”

“ Into such anguish many have sunk upon some sudden diminution of their fortune, an unexpected blast of their reputation, or the loss of children or of friends. They have suffered all sensibility of pleasure to be destroyed by a single blow, have given up for ever the hopes of substituting any other object in the room of that which they lament, resigned their lives to gloom and despondency, and worn themselves out in unavailing misery. ”

“ He has continually in his mind’s eye the awful falling of the curtain on anguish and despair and death. Half unconsciously he hastens on in his perusal, and slurs over minor episodes and seemingly trifling facts, forgetting that these are subsidiary and auxiliary to the terrible consummation which he so anxiously awaits. ”

“ For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own. I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself ”

“ You saw, or fancied you saw in them the shrewdness, the delicacy of tact; the consciousness of duping others; the subtle and intuitive, yet bland and noiseless penetration into the characters around him, which made the prominent features of his mind. And, indeed, of all qualities, dissimulation is that which betrays itself the most often in the physiognomy. A fortunate thing, that the long habit of betraying should find at times the index in which to betray itself. ”

“ Bound down by the greed of gain! So that the nobler powers of mind and body, and soul, are degraded and cramped in them—men and women slaves of superstition, slaves of prodigies and foolish fancies wrought into their very nature. ”

“ I trembled to think what a nature I should soon be confronted with, and how terrible must be the temper of a man whose resentments asked for such aliment to maintain them! I stole away abashed at my own intrusiveness, and feeling that I was rightfully punished by the misery that overwhelmed me. How differently now did all the splendor appear to me as I retraced my steps! how defiantly I gazed on that magnificence which seemed to insult the poverty I had just quitted! ”

“ Thus the dogma of the fall is not simply the expression of a special and transitory state of human reason and morality: it is the spontaneous confession, in symbolic phrase, of this fact as astonishing as it is indestructible, the culpability, the inclination to evil, of our race. Curse upon me a sinner! cries on every hand and in every tongue the conscience of the human race. ”

“ The disgust attendant on so ugly a sickness magnified this dislike; at the same time, and with more than compensating strength, shame for a sentiment so inhuman bound them the more straitly to his service; and even the evil they knew of him swelled their solicitude, for the thought of death is always the least supportable when it draws near to the merely sensual and selfish. ”