Insolation

“ Silence filled the room: a cold, lonely, wintry, silence, with not a sound but that of the flaring gas. From the faded characters of the frayed, yellow letter, torn in part, rose hatred, passion, mad jubilation, mad agony of love and remorse for a night of blood, an Indian mountain night, clattering with torrents of rain. ”

“ Sometimes, it is true, a sense of isolation enfolds me like a cold mist as I sit alone and wait at life's shut gate. Beyond there is light, and music, and sweet companionship; but I may not enter. Fate, silent, pitiless, bars the way. Fain would I question his imperious decree, for my heart is still undisciplined and passionate; but my tongue will not utter the bitter, futile words that rise to my lips, and they fall back into my heart like unshed tears. Silence sits immense upon my soul. ”

“ As autumn approached, with faint notice on his part, his anger and resentment retreated, leaving in their wake a gentle stir of regret and remorse. Imperceptibly, he grew physically weary; a strange sensation of loneliness and isolation enveloped him. A species of timidity came upon him; he felt an unhappy remoteness from people, and began to edge away from life. ”

“ And the loneliness and silence of the night will take a shape almost tangible. The stirring of the half-dead leaves, the chirping of a belated cricket, simply emphasized the loneliness and made the silence more profound. At intervals, all nature seemed to heave a deep sigh, and address itself to slumber again. ”

“ Solitude, isolation, are painful things, and beyond human endurance. ”

“ In my solitary walks at night I used to feel a strange uneasiness; I used to wonder why I could not sleep; why I should find such pleasure in gazing upon the stars that I could not tear myself from their presence; why my heart should suddenly beat with joy on seeing certain colours, or grow sad even to tears on hearing certain sounds. At times I was so alarmed on comparing my continual agitation with the indifference of other men of my class that I even began to imagine that I was mad. ”

“ In the religious shadow and silence of the place, in the shadow and ecstatic silence of every soul, a sigh went up from the invisible orchestra, a moan was uttered, a murmuring voice made the first mournful call of solitary desire, the first and confused anguish in presentiment of the future torture. ”

“ Only a cruel, cold isolation. It had been a steep ascent; the declivity of the farther side led him down to a steep and certain ruin and the dark night below. But he stiffened suddenly and threw his head high as if he faced his fate ”

“ The silence grows gloomy, oppressive. It fills me with mysterious awe. It lives. It pulsates with slow, measured breathing, as of some monster. It rises and falls; approaches, recedes. It is Misery asleep. ”

“ It may sleep and be silent for a season, for years, unprovoked by stimulating circumstances; but let the moral atmosphere once receive its color from the suddenly-passing cloud, and the dark spot dilates within the heart, grows active, and rapidly sends its poisonous and poisoning tendrils through all the avenues of mind. ”

“ The feeling of desolation and loneliness which came upon one when he looked for the first time upon this immense landscape of silence was made still greater by the faint signs of the presence of human beings that were here and there discernible. ”

“ And thus the sequence of what followed, proved extraordinarily difficult to remember afterwards. An atmosphere of sadness, of foreboding, of premonition came over me; there was desolation in my heart; there were stabs of horrible presentiment. All these, moreover, were ever vaguely related to one thing⁠—that inexplicable faint odour of burning.⁠ ⁠... ”

“ And of all kinds of isolation, inward isolation is the most appalling. The early anchorite lived with God; he dwelt in the spirit world, the most populous world of all. The miser lives in a world of imagination and fruition; his whole life and all that he is, even his sex, lies in his brain. ”

“ For languor, dull headaches, nausea, and troubled dreams, though singly and momentarily no very serious evils, can aggregate in a sum of misery that has induced all northern nations to make a high temperature the chief characteristic of the pit of torment. ”

“ Excepting for these two beings—so near to Paradise—solitude is to the mind what torture is to the body. Between solitude and the torture-chamber there is all the difference that there is between a nervous malady and a surgical disease. ”

“ It is this critical period of convalescence which is so important, and so difficult in the management of the insane.
I further observe, that the variation of temperature of the system, observed during paroxysms of insanity, is more like that produced by the passions in a state of excitement than that which accompanies inflammatory fever. It appears to fluctuate in quantity, and to be tumultuous in its distribution, in proportion as the exciting and depressing passions are active and contending with each other. ”

“ Ignominious insults, bitter and galling threats, exposure to scorching heat by day and to frosty cold at night, torturing pangs of hunger,—these were the methods by which stalwart men had been transformed into ghastly beings with sunken eyes and sepulchral voices. ”

“ The isolation, the remorse, the heart-hardening power of stern discipline which regulates diet and toil, waking and sleeping and which sharply limits free-will and free-act; the dread consciousness that you are henceforth to be classed among social outcasts and forever mistrusted and distrusted are all part of an unspeakable whole. ”

“ The isolation, the darkened days, the suffering that affects the mind and spirits even more than the body, the emptiness of the life,—all these things tend to induce him to cling to the human being who waits on him as a drowned man clings to a plank ”

“ There had been a sound foreign to the serene silence of the peaceful, sleeping household; a sound too low to rouse a slumberer from repose by its mere volume, too low almost to be heard; a sound so low as to obtrude itself only upon the most super-sensitive sub-consciousness—Varge lay awake. ”

“ The air about us might be loud with rumour, or be silent; there might be a clock ticking, or a storm raging in the night outside, but anyhow, and however our mood, the sleeplessness always in the end prevailed over all circumstances, and knotted up the customary arabesques of our sensation into one pattern, mechanical and terrifying in its regularity. A cold terror would take hold of us—the lucid ordered distraction of severe insomnia—and we would be lost in a passionless despair, in that desert of opaque oppression which is ultimate fatigue. ”

“ A few steps came and went, passing me; but no one took any notice, and the absence of the noise and crowding gave me a momentary respite. But in my heat and fever I got no{42} relief of coolness from the contact of the soil. I might have flung myself upon a bed of hot ashes, so much was it unlike the dewy cool earth which I expected, upon which one can always throw one’s self with a sensation of repose. ”

“ In the writings of a recluse one always hears something of the echo of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. ”

“ Instead of the depression, there came into my mind that joy that had so continually been mine in prison; the experience that the isolation, driving one back upon oneself, had brought one into the presence of the Beyond-Oneself; the sense that God, and Good, and Beauty were one; the honour of being privileged to help stem the tide of an evil force. ”

“ Spectral Silence THE SILENCE GROWS more oppressive, the solitude unbearable. My natural buoyancy is weighted down by a nameless dread. With dismay I realize the failing elasticity of my step, the gradual loss of mental vivacity. ”

“ Silence and solitude reign throughout the courts, undisturbed by any sound save that of the ceaseless winds, which seem to be ever chanting their melancholy dirge over the faded glories of the Escorial. ”

“ Isolt, with her cold and passionate nature, is a most haunting figure, and her mysterious appearances are very dramatic. The hero in a different way is equally fine,—distinguished by a silence at once pathetic and magnificent."—London Athenæum. ”

“ Who, but they who have felt it, can imagine the sense of loneliness and desolation which must be the portion of those who in the hour of dangerous illness are left to be tended by strangers; for what hands, be they ever so gentle, can wipe the clammy brow, or smooth the restless bed, like those of mother, wife, or child? ”

“ Changes of temperature, a sudden thaw in midwinter, or a sultry day after a protracted rain, have a similar tendency, but the most frequent proximate cause is violent mental emotion—fear, anxiety, and especially suppressed anger. ”

“ Sometimes, in the resonant night, you can hear these sinister noises whirling for a long time above the housetops, and as you can see nothing, you feel, despite your efforts, a kind of dread and kindred discomfort, until the sobbing multitude is lost in boundless space. ”

“ In that hour she repeated what the merciful eyes of solitude have looked on for ages in the spiritual struggles of man—she besought hardness and coldness and aching weariness to bring her relief from the mysterious incorporeal might of her anguish: she lay on the bare floor and let the night grow cold around her ”

“ Desolation is brightened by a radiant light, infinitely attenuated, “diaphanous as the starry void.” It caresses the bristling scenery. It penetrates caverns and fills them with a gold and purple mist. In the world of light and shade which it creates, even the shade gives light. ”

“ Dragged out of an eternity of silent isolation And doomed to partiality, partial being, Ache, and want of being, Want, Self-exposure, hard humiliation, need to add himself on to her. Born to walk alone, Forerunner, Now suddenly distracted into this mazy sidetrack, This awkward, harrowing pursuit, This grim necessity from within. Does she know As she moves eternally slowly away? ”

“ Upon the desolate spot, where fate had placed me, I conceived myself far more happy than many, who, for ignominious crimes, were doomed to drag out their lives in solitary confinement with conscience ever biting as a corrosive canker. ”

“ We call spiritual desolation any darkening and disturbance of the mind instigating to low and earthly things ; also, every disquietude and agitation or temptation, which moves to distrust concerning salvation, and expels hope and charity, whence the soul finds herself all torpid, lukewarm, sorrowful, and, as it were, separated from her Creator and Lord. ”

“ They now entered upon a scene of desolation not to be witnessed without deep emotion, which naturally follows wherever the melancholy consciousness arises that a vast addition has been made to the sum of human misery. ”

“ And, if desolation, which is the destruction of life, cannot leave its impression perfect without some interruption, much less can solitude, which is only the absence of life, be felt without some contrast. ”

“ Already a great calm was broadening down over the world, because the abomination of desolation, the usurper of divine attributes and honours, the false god and true devil, the grim, huge, hideous, overshadowing, bearded idol of a thousand centuries or more, tottered to its fall ”

“ Where only insolence and misery come?
[Pg 504]
20
(Save that the curious will by chance appear,
Or some in pity drop a fruitless tear,)
To a damp prison, where the very sight
Of the warm sun is favour and not right;
Where all we hear or see the feelings shock,
The oath and groan, the fetter and the lock?
Who could bear this and live?—Oh! many a year
All this is borne, and miseries more severe;
And some there are, familiar with the scene,
Who live in mirth, though few become serene. ”

“ There, immense tracts sloping gradually upward show a desolation so peculiar, so utterly unlike every common solitude of nature, that one enters upon it with the shudder we give at that which is wholly unnatural. ”

“ Open the door." Dead silence. Perfect unbroken silence, and the darkness seemed to wrap round me and envelope me in a thick fog. There was an oppression, a weight in the atmosphere, and I felt an indescribable something that seemed to make it an impossibility either to speak or move. ”

“ You know how it takes some people, even the sanest? That is the devil of what they call its convalescence. One can endure the fever and the pain and the nausea; but the suicidal depression during recovery! ”

“ Can any of us look back to the earlier days of our mortal pilgrimage and remember the helpless sense of desolation and loneliness caused by being forced to go off to the stillness and darkness of a solitary bed far from all the beloved voices and employments and sights of life? ”

“ The heat is stifling. An abnormal silence reigns over the land. All this has a remarkable effect upon certain organisms, and produces nervous complaints, a buzzing in the ears, a sense of painful oppression, a sort of good-for-nothingness that we combat in vain. ”

“ I thought that solitude would now be a relief to me; that to weep would somewhat ease my burdened heart? yet, strange to say, I could not shed a tear. The extreme wretchedness of feeling this inability even to shed tears excites, under some of the heaviest calamities, is the severest trial of all, and I have often experienced it. ”