Divisibility

“ A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don’t you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences—eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey. ”

“ But if we established ourselves in the minds of your normal people, we'd be without will. As mere observers, we'd become assimilated in time, and thus extinguished as a separate race. That, of course, we could not permit. And if we settled in the minds most suitable to receive us, we would be in the minds of those who by your standards are insane—whose destiny is controlled by the others. ”

“ I may, indeed, divide in my thoughts, or conceive apart from each other, those things which, perhaps, I never perceived by sense so divided. Thus I imagine the trunk of a human body without the limbs, or conceive the smell of a rose without thinking on the rose itself. ”

“ Where the cause of delusion melts away, like darkness in light, in the secondless, supreme reality, undifferentiated, what separateness can there be?
In the supreme reality, the very Self of oneness, how could any word of difference dwell? By whom is difference perceived in purely blissful dreamlessness? ”

“ One notable result of this sudden relaxation of unity, this sudden predominance of the subgroups, appeared in the phenomena of displacement. Displacement is a common matter among paranoiacs, where one object is substituted for another with the same meaning and the same feeling-tone of resentment or of pleasure. ”

“ I had descended, then, not only into an inhabited world—not only into a world of men, who, however they might differ in outward form, must resemble in their wants, ideas, and habits, in short, in mind if not in body, the lords of my own planet—but into a civilised world and among a race living under a settled order, cultivating the soil, and taming the brutes to their service. ”

“ People speak with precisely marked division of mind and body, of will, emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but its convenient lines are lost to us as we watch a being with soul all blurred, body all shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania, rising in slow clouds of mephitic steam from suddenly heated stagnancies of the blood, and turning the reality of conduct and duty into distant unmeaning [i.257] shadows. ”

“ Are we then to hide our heads here till the snows of age gather upon them? Are we, of all our race, to live and die obscure, unknown? Father, we cannot stand it; it shall not be! To thee we come to ask more of ourselves than yet we know. ”

“ I know of no æons or periods, no life and death, but these meetings and separations. My life is like a stream that is suddenly dammed and has no outlet. But it rises higher up the hills that shut it in, and will become a deep and silent lake. Certainly there is no event comparable for grandeur with the eternal separation, if we may conceive it so, from a being that we have known. I become in a degree sensible of the meaning of finite and infinite. ”

“ Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman. ”

“ And his mind passed through those phases in which a face which we have not seen for many years first strikes us with the outward changes brought about during the time of separation, and then gradually becomes more and more like its old self, when the changes made by time seem to disappear, and before our spiritual eyes rises only the principal expression of one exceptional, unique individuality. ”

“ I look despairingly on all sides, and see no escape! I am bound, hand and foot, by the chains of my own noble birth, and shut within the iron walls of circumstance. I struggle vainly in my captivity; no way of freedom is open to me! ”

“ The vast annihilation that has swallowed all things—the voiceless solitude of the once busy earth—the lonely state of singleness which hems me in, has deprived even such details of their stinging reality, and mellowing the lurid tints of past anguish with poetic hues, I am able to escape from the mosaic of circumstance, by perceiving and reflecting back the grouping and combined colouring of the past. ”

“ Why should I stand apart and alone from my race, relying on myself only, and depriving myself, for the sake of a perhaps imaginary independence, of all the endearments of social life, all the sweet ties of family? ”

“ Perhaps we all have. After all I take it that separation, like time, tries everything—love, friendship, even acquaintance, and those of the three which survive the test are like the ruins of ancient cities, of great value as curiosities, but worth little for aught else. ”

“ A true insight into, and discrimination of, life, is at the same time a revelation of all that comes to us outside of life. For experience consists inevitably of opposites, and the only constant is that which experiences, the Self. ”

“ As all things differ, every state of affection and thought must have points of divergence from all other states, giving birth to some surroundings peculiar to itself. Therefore separations take place. Each thing has an individual sphere; each standpoint a different horizon. One thing stands apart from another in space; one thing succeeds another in time. ”

“ I know how deeply rooted in the human mind is the belief that it is only a departure to another place and a different condition of life. Can a conviction that has been universal in all ages and among all peoples be a delusion? ”

“ Then I made up my mind to flee to the end of the world, where no one ever goes. But is there a place anywhere, to which no one has ever yet been? I took nothing belonging to the dying animals, not even the halters; I left everything. And when the leader fell I did not even take the figured band from his head, which had come down to me from my ancestors.'
'A-ah!' responded the listeners. ”

“ When they have wished to depress and subjugate a race they have slammed the doors of their history on them, and left them alone, spiritless and forlorn, passed by and forgotten by the Ages, despised of themselves and of their neighbours. ”

“ The absurdity of the pretence of making the division depend on protestations of love from his daughters, his complete blindness to the hypocrisy which is patent to us at a glance, his piteous delight in these protestations, the openness of his expressions of preference for his youngest daughter—all make us smile, but all pain us. ”

“ But when a separation takes place between the mind and the body, we shall come into new relations, although we shall not at once change our thoughts, feelings, and affections, and shall recognize ourselves. ”

“ We are as free to choose our invisible as we are our visible associates. Nay, we do choose them, whether we think of it or not. We have actually chosen them, though it may not be for eternity; for we have the power to change our invisible as well as our visible companions. ”

“ Did you ever think that the desire of distinction was one of the most, perhaps the most, intense purely spiritual emotion of the human soul? Look at the way these people live here, grubbing away at the soil like ants. ”

“ The scene of separation was heartrending to all but the doomed man, who was calm, and even smiled once or twice, in order to cheer, if he could, the poor creatures whom he had rendered cheerless for ever. ”

“ New scenes, owing, perhaps, part of their charm to that circumstance, may occasionally betray us into exaggeration; but the records of a last coup-d'œil, when we dwell with sad complacency upon every feature, as upon those of a friend from whom we are about to part, are characterised at once by an equal freshness, and by more truth, feeling, and discrimination. ”

“ Is your heart constituted differently from every other human heart?—I have lately observed an inequality in your behaviour, that has whispered something flattering to my heart. Examine yourself—Have you felt no peculiar interest in what concerns me—would the idea of our separation affect you with no more than a slight and common emotion?—One more question propose to yourself, as a test—Could you see me form a new, and more fortunate, attachment, with indifference? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The influences tending to create dissimilarity, which, in our day at least, are at work, without a moment's intermission, from the cradle to the grave, are incessantly neutralised in each successive generation. ”

“ And just so far as I fall short of systematic individuality, whether from the poverty of my interests or their mutual incompatibility, the appearance of unity in my life is illusory, and I must be pronounced an unreal appearance. ”

“ They cover their bodies—but they do not cover their faces nor their minds nor their souls. And this is the marvel, they are not ashamed! They reveal the emptiness of their faces and the darkness of their minds without complaining to each other or to the police. From any standpoint of reality, the points of view of the many need only to be expressed to reveal their abandonment.... ”

“ The displacement, the removal, which helps us to escape ourselves, gives him the sensation of his identity. Again a proof of youth and force! He will grow older; I hope he may, since he desires it; and already I can easily understand that if I should penetrate into the West, every turn of the wheels would carry me from an older to a newer world. ”

“ Truth now comes to us in such small segments that we no longer see the pattern of it; but this we are able to perceive: that the mystery of Separation is equal in degree with the mystery of Union, and that the child of separation is Pain. ”

“ I have often perplexed myself to divine the various motives that give impulse to this strange migration; but whatever they may be, whether an insane hope of a better condition of life, or a desire of shaking off the restraints of law and society, or mere restlessness, certain it is that multitudes bitterly repent the journey. ”

“ This is the rebound of the hard earth—sensitive and soft, although we call it hard, and feeling with an instant keen discrimination the different touch of each different human nature which is laid upon it. ”

“ Many other falls we shall have record of, and in most of them segregation is the great mystery. A whirlwind seems anything but a segregative force. Segregation of things that have fallen from the sky has been avoided as most deep-dyed of the damned. ”

“ We have long been accustomed by habits of speech, fictions of law, and also by the results of introspection, to consider each person as constituting an indivisible unity. Actual researches utterly modify this current notion. ”

“ Healing.—The paralyzing and agonizing consequences of ruptured love can only be remedied by diversion and society. Bring the mind into a state of patriotic independence with a full determination to blot out the past. ”

“ So long as one is numbered among the living—so long, that is to say, as one is still plunged in the world of men, a sharer of their interests, conflicts, vanities, passions, and duties, one is bound to deny one’s self this subtle state of consciousness; one must consent to be a separate individual, having one’s special name, position, age, and sphere of activity. ”

“ Suppose the entity that men call the soul of man were in process of separation from the body. The process you will admit would occupy time, until the point of liberation was reached. Would not dissolution, so far as the separation of matter and spirit is concerned at its critical point be instantaneous? ”

“ Pour views of its own hideous state revolve around the lost soul, like the pictures of some ghastly show. One while it sees the million times ten million genera and species of pains of sense which meet and form a loathsome union with this vast central pain of loss. ”

“ The core of the separation illusion lies simply in the fantasy of destruction of love's meaning. And unless love's meaning is restored to you, you cannot know yourself who share its meaning. Separation is only the decision not to know yourself. ”

“ But the notion of a place was derived only with the separation from the rest in which we have been placed. With our death this separation will disappear, and therefore for people living in this world we will be everywhere or nowhere. ”

“ We are oftenest diverted in the street, but amused in our chambers. We are diverted from our engagements, but amused when we are listless. We may be diverted from an amusement, and amused by a diversion. It often happens that a diversion becomes our amusement, and an amusement our employment. ”