Distraint

“ If to these mental distresses are added a delicate frame of body, and a mind ambitious of some higher distinction than that of being the tyrant of childhood, the reader may have some slight conception of the relief which a solitary walk, in the cool of a fine summer evening, affords to the head which has ached, and the nerves which have been shattered, for so many hours, in plying the irksome task of public instruction. ”

“ From quite early days, the time of first waking in the morning has been apt to be for me a time of mental agitation; any unpleasant and humiliating incident, any disagreeable prospect, have always tended to dart into my brain, which, unstrung and weakened by sleep, has often been disposed to view things with a certain poignancy of distress at that hour—a distress which I always knew would vanish the moment I felt my feet on the carpet. ”

“ Let them remember that a time of distress is a time of dreadful temptation, and all the strength to resist is taken away; poverty presses, the soul is made desperate by distress, and what can be done? ”

“ Its procrastination is impossible; the stroke is already felt—even now I drink of the cup of retribution: a change of being cannot aggravate my woe; till consciousness itself be extinct, the worm that gnaws me will never perish. ”

“ The weary watchings, the very dread of the arrival of expresses, bearing we know not what tidings, the feverish restlessness to see the printed dispatches of the day, the waiting for hours in uncertainty, and then the regret, amidst our thankfulness at so much being done, that there was yet so much to do. ”

“ His actions are distractions, But then his distractions can be traced back to a definite, positive cause. They are no longer cases of absence of mind, pure and simple; they find their explanation in the presence of the individual in quite definite, though imaginary, surroundings. ”

“ The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. ”

“ Storms of hisses or bursts of ironical applause greet every sentence that he utters, and the curtain finally falls on his disgrace. This generally cures the disease of which we have been speaking. A night of agony, a week of pain, and the young gentleman, disenchanted and disenthralled, looks back upon his temporary mania with feelings of humiliation and surprise, cuts his aiders and abettors, and betakes himself seriously to the rational business of life.
But there are some stage-struck gentlemen whom nothing can convince of their total unfitness for the stage. ”

“ But to-day, my own sense of fatigue, the pity I conceive for myself, disposed me strongly to a tenderness for others. For a moment the whole world seemed to present itself as a hospital of sick persons; many of them sick in mind; all of whom it would be a brutality not to humour, not to indulge. ”

“ Many is the hour when, after a hard day's work, or an exciting scene of peril or suffering, by the dim light of a tallow candle, or a lamp manufactured by my own hands, while others were lamenting their hard fate, or pouring out their indignation in unavailing grumblings, I have, while poring over a book, lost all sense of unhappiness, and been transported far away to other and happier scenes ”

“ She was, however, resolved on resignation and the fulfilment of duty, when, instead of listening to language full of devotion, love, and tenderness, which would compensate for the sorrowful feelings which were uppermost in her mind, she sees convulsed at her feet a stricken man, who twists, and foams, and shrieks, in the hideous convulsions of one of the most fearful infirmities with which a man can be incurably smitten! ”

“ All of us are putting up with the same discomforts, the same nerve strain and we're getting sport out of it, or at least the consciousness that we must sacrifice comforts for the cause. You are the first I have heard complain. ”

“ Often, as little things, after romping all day, the enforced sitting would be too much for us, and our drowsiness would soon show itself in continued nods. Then, to arouse, us, he had a way of stirring us up with his foot—laughing heartily at and with us. ”

“ The late stress upon me had enabled me to put off illness, but not to put it away; I knew that it was coming on me now, and I knew very little else, and was even careless as to that.
For a day or two, I lay on the sofa, or on the floor—anywhere, according as I happened to sink down—with a heavy head and aching limbs, and no purpose, and no power. Then there came, one night which appeared of great duration, and which teemed with anxiety and horror; and when in the morning I tried to sit up in my bed and think of it, I found I could not do so. ”

“ Kindness and attention were repaid by discontent and cursing. At times he would drop asleep, and ceasing to think of his breath, would awake suffocating, and break the silence of night with the most awful outcries. ”

“ There is a moment of profound discouragement which succeeds to prolonged effort; when, the labor which has become a habit having ceased, we miss the sustaining sense of its companionship, and stand, with a feeling of strangeness and embarrassment, before the abrupt and naked result. As regards myself, in the present instance, the force of all such sensations is increased by the circumstances to which I have referred. And in this moment of discouragement and doubt, my heart instinctively turns to you, from whom it has so often sought, from whom it has never failed to receive, support. ”

“ I was still impressed by the barbarous event which I had been compelled to witness without being able to assist the poor victim, and perhaps fatigue helped to make things appear blacker, for I had had no sleep for three days and three nights. I had to rest, and find again the freshness, the optimism which now began to fail me. ”

“ Think of me at this hour, in a strange place, labouring under a blackness of distress that no fancy can exaggerate, and yet well aware that, if you will but punctually serve me, my troubles will roll away like a story that is told. ”

“ Phrases like "to sit on thorns," "to be on pins and needles," "to drain the cup of misery to the dregs," show with graphic power the folly and curse of worry. Why should one sit on thorns, or on pins and needles? If one does so accidentally he arises in a hurry, yet in worrying, one seems deliberately, with intent, to sit down upon prickles in order to compel himself to discomfort, distress, and pain. Is there any wisdom, when one has the cup of misery at his lips, in deliberately keeping it there, and persistently drinking it to the "very dregs"? ”

“ Eat, drink, be merry and forget. It is best.” Thus life, and it is her intention that they shall. Each sorrow or deprivation or disaster as it befalls them is painted in their consciousness as special to them. ”

“ I sat down to take off my boots; then I took up the book I was reading. My father all this time had not spoken a word, and I had returned him silence for silence. Sometimes, after a whole evening of this kind of thing, my feeling of constraint would become so acute that the effort required to say even good night would appear almost insurmountable, and I would invent all sorts of excuses for slipping out of the room without doing so. ”

“ Never was a life more free from interruptions from without. And if disturbance ever emanates from within, why, clearly the fault must be my own, and should serve as a reminder of how vastly uneasy my life would surely be in more civilised surroundings, where interruptions descend upon one from without, thick as smuts through the window of a London garret--save where the garreteer cares to do without air. ”

“ We speak of distracting a man’s attention, when we call him off from looking at one thing to make him look at something else, and we call anything which interrupts us in our business, or puts a thought suddenly out of our heads, a distraction. ”

“ But it is mind sickness which he most dreads; in an environment where little makes for silence, permanence, or repose; where “all things, whether animate or inanimate, change and change ceaselessly; they seem to emerge from the nowhere without rhyme or reason, for a brief space form a portion of the child’s universe, and then, without rhyme or reason, pass out into the nowhere again.” ”

“ Days and weeks passed slowly on, with nothing to cheer us, but everything to depress our spirits. Cold, hungry, and discouraged with the sight of so much misery all about us, little wonder that some lost their reason. ”

“ Haven’t I walked the floor night after night! when you haven’t been here? Bear with you—yes, yes! Who’s to bear with me when my heart is breaking? Oh, God!” she suddenly added, with passionate vigor, “I’m miserable! I’m miserable! My heart aches! It aches!” ”

“ Those who do not suffer from this absurd mania for action escape those painful moments when we are at the mercy of a distracted will that no longer knows exactly what it ought to want. In absence, our feelings pass through so many contradictory phases! ”

“ Frightfully bruised, you lie annihilated in the midst of a chaos of nameless pains; then, little by little, thought follows the vertigo. As sight becomes accustomed to distinguishing the objects in the gloom, you begin, so to speak, to recognise yourself in your despair. ”

“ There thoughts, sentiments, opinions, feelings, actions too, are nothing but agitation in empty space--to amuse life--a sort of superior debauchery, exciting and fatiguing, meaning nothing, leading nowhere. ”

“ I felt like I was in control of my life instead of the other way around, like its challenges just bounced off me as I kept doing what I wanted. Normally I feel buffeted by events, a thousand tiny distractions nagging at the back of my head at all times. ”

“ I am now convinced that the wretches who fly from a heavy scene, labour under ten times more distress in the intermediate suspense and apprehension, than they could have, were they present at it, and to see and know the worst: so capable is fancy or imagination, the more immediate offspring of the soul, to outgo fact, let the subject be either joyous or grievous. ”

“ I never know what to expect, what scarifying question they are going to hurtle at me, or what cold, examining eyes are going to strip me to the bone—eyes that represent brains so shrewd and merciless that one wonders why they do not startle the world long before they usually do. ”

“ All because you attend so closely to the mere feeling of the time per se, and because your attention to that is susceptible of such fine-grained successive subdivision. The odiousness of the whole experience comes from its insipidity; for stimulation is the indispensable requisite for pleasure in an experience, and the feeling of bare time is the least stimulating experience we can have. ”

“ Never was there a more miserable being than I was for the last six months previous to my coming of age, and to drown my misery I plunged into every excess, and seldom, if ever, went to bed but in a state of intoxication. ”

“ Very early, out of the extravagant vagaries of a child's brain, an audacious word had escaped, sped by a temper aflame, for which he had suffered—from youngsters a day's derision, from a strict elder a look that was worse disgrace. ”

“ The marginal distractions in such a case would consist, first, in external sensations, such as the glare from your study-lamp, the hissing of the radiator, the practising of a neighboring vocalist, the rattle of passing street-cars. The bodily distractions might consist of sensations of weariness referred to the back, the arms and the eyes, and fainter sensations from the digestive organs, heart and lungs. The irrelevant ideas might consist of thoughts about a German lesson which you are going to study, visions of a face, or thoughts about some social engagement. ”

“ If we are eternally surprised by our own limitations, our own torpidity and dullness, there are also—and for this heaven be thanked—some possibilities of surprise upon the other side, and that for the oldest, the saddest, the least alert amongst us. A hundred hours of intolerable dullness and stagnation pass over our heads. ”

“ This melancholy, or state of depression, caused by the activity of the depressing passions, is to be distinguished from the state of exhaustion and debility, which succeeds some violent paroxysms, or which follows an exhausted state of body and mind from overexertion, and assumes either an apparent melancholy character, from torpor or partial suspension of mind, or is in reality a case of melancholia of the most miserable description, from the exclusive activity of these depressing passions, which are then more likely to become the sole masters of the field of action. ”

“ In the distress which had come like a cloud over the sunlight of his spirits, so gayly anticipative a few hours previous, they flung a wordless challenge to the battling instinct in the man, and he accepted it with the thought that the best balm for troubled minds is strenuous bodily action. ”

“ Each day brought some new discomfiture, and as we met at mess, instead of having, as heretofore, some prospect of pleasure and amusement to chat over, it was only to talk gloomily over our miserable failures, and lament the dreary quarters that our fates had doomed us to. ”