Nerve ending

“ Then from the lowest, weakest tone of suffering, up to the loftiest pitch, the divinest acme of pain, there is not one pang to which the sensorium of the universe does not respond; never an untuneful vibration of nerve or spirit but thrills beyond the brain or the heart of the sufferer to the brain, the heart of the universe ”

“ In later years I have not suffered from the fearsome malady, but even now, after fifty years of stage-life, I never play a new part without being overcome by a terrible nervousness and a torturing dread of forgetting my lines. Every nerve in my body seems to be dancing an independent jig on its own account. ”

“ World.
“Certain nerves which ramify through the human heart have been affected emotionally by the nonsensical teachings of the King’s Highway. These teachings are commonly known us ‘Narrow-Gauge Ideas.’ If these nerves are rendered insensible, there is scarcely any trouble of that kind again. We can, by an intricate operation, paralyze the mother-nerve leading to the heart, and thereafter you may expect to find the heart of this woman almost dead to the foolish influences that needlessly send conviction and remorse into so many lives.” ”

“ How, then, do we explain those morbid phenomena which have their origin in misplaced affection, in disappointed ambition, in hatred, or in anger, and which culminate either in serious chronic maladies, or in death or suicide? They all seem to start from an impairment of the cerebro-spinal centres. The continual excitation of these by everpresent emotions determines a paralysis of the central nerve-substance, and thus affects its connections with the nerves extending out to the various organs. These nerves next degenerate by degrees, and soon the great functions are compromised. ”

“ But when action is hesitant there always seem several alternative possibilities of nervous discharge. The feeling awakened lay the nascent excitement of each nerve-track seems by its attractive or repulsive quality to determine whether the excitement shall abort or shall become complete. Where indecision is great, as before a dangerous leap, consciousness is agonisingly intense. ”

“ These presentations are of extreme distinctness and clearness. Consciousness is, as it were, flooded with the blinding light of mid-day. There therefore takes place exactly the reverse of what has been noticed in the case of the ordinary mystic. The ecstatic state is associated with extremely intense emotions, in which the highest bliss is mixed with pain. These emotions accompany every strong and excessive functioning of the nerve-cells, every extraordinary and violent decomposition of nerve-nutriment. ”

“ In this state and the consequent excitement of the nerves, she had almost wholly lost organic force, and received it only by transmission from those of stronger condition, principally from their eyes and the ends of the fingers. The atmosphere and nerve communications of others, said she, bring me the life which I need; they do not feel it; these effusions on which I live, would flow from them and be lost, if my nerves did not attract them; only in this way can I live. ”

“ If it be true that nerves have sensation, that matter has intelligence, that its organization causes the eyes to Nerves painless. see and the ears to hear, then, when the body is dematerialized, those faculties must be lost, for they are not immortal as Mind; whereas the fact is that only through dematerialization can these faculties be conceived of as immortal.
Nerves are not the source of pain or pleasure. We suffer or enjoy in our dreams, but this pain or pleasure is not communicated through a nerve. ”

“ Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear. ”

“ And as, when head or eye in us is smit By assailing pain, we are not tortured then Through all the body, so the mind alone Is sometimes smitten, or livens with a joy, Whilst yet the soul's remainder through the limbs And through the frame is stirred by nothing new. But when the mind is moved by shock more fierce, We mark the whole soul suffering all at once Along man's members: sweats and pallors spread Over the body, and the tongue is broken, And fails the voice away, and ring the ears, Mists blind the eyeballs, and the joints collapse,— Aye, men drop dead from terror of the mind. ”

“ Pain begins, for the heart springs into life, and fills the silence with the terror of its beatings, thick, knifing, frightful in its intense longing. Power of mind over soul, power of calm over fear avail nothing ”

“ These nerves are the instruments of expression, from the smile upon the infant’s cheek, to the last agony of life. It is when the strong man is subdued by this mysterious influence of soul on body, and when the passions may be truly said to tear the heart, that we have the most afflicting picture of human frailty, and the most unequivocal proof that it is the order of functions we have been considering, that is thus affected. ”

“ I know nothing about nerves; but I suppose that, whether they act on the brain or the heart, the result to life is much the same if the nerves be too finely strung for life’s daily wear and tear. And this is what I mean, when I say you and Lilian will not suit. ”

“ When I put my hand on her, my heart beats with a passion of fear and ecstasy, for I touch my own passing away, my own ceasing-to-be, I apprehend my own consummation in a darkness which obliterates me in its infinity. My veins rock as if they were being destroyed, the blood takes fire on the edge of oblivion, and beats backward and forward. ”

“ Long days of suffering followed as the tortured nerves recorded their far-spread effects in the waste of the body and that failure of emotional control which even the most courageous feel when long under the tyranny of continuous pain. ”

“ Do you persevere. Ah! when pain has thoroughly relaxed those nerves and softened the fibres that you take to be so pliant and yielding; when a shriveled heart has learned to expand and contract and to beat under this discipline; when the brain has capitulated—then, perhaps, passion may enter among the steel springs of this machinery that turns out tears and affectations and languors and melting phrases ”

“ It comes over one in paroxysms, followed by a great calm as from sudden cessation of acute pain, then by a choking sensation, a terrible sinking of the heart, down, down, all things swim in the convulsion of lost senses until tears once more relieve the overwrought soul. ”

“ No cry escaped her, nor sound except a moan, half of mental pain, half of the deadly sickness, the actual nausea, which every one who has ever sustained a severe shock of pain or fear knows is its invariable accompaniment. ”

“ But the preoccupation of these useful tears caused a diversion in my feelings by interrupting the spontaneity, and, in consequence, retarded the physiological phenomena of tears. "If I could not weep? Suppose the tears do not come?" I thought with ridiculous and puerile fear, as if my fate depended on this slight material fact that my will did not suffice to produce. And yet a voice always the same whispered inwardly: "What a mistake! What a mistake! No opportunity could be more propitious. One can scarcely see one's self in this room. What effect sobbing would have in the dark!" ”

“ They prove that suffering is confined within definite limits, and that economy of pain forms part of the universal design, for the sensitive animal as well as the sensitive man. If all our nerves shrank equally with equal tenderness, life would be a history of protracted agony. Yet one might have expected, primâ facie, that a fibre which telegraphs shapes and colours with their blendings, would eloquently tell the story of its own occasional anguish. And our whole nervous framework might have been conceived as an instrument of torture. ”

“ For the delirious disquietude that had taken possession of her, had its physical, not less than its mental, side. The long overstraining of the delicate nerves, the long overburdening of the heart that knew its own bitterness, were fast reaching the point beyond which must needs come fever, or insanity, or death. Nature—often the wisest of physicians, when left to herself—had sought to work restoration by means of the apathy aforementioned, wrapping her mind and heart as with quilted armor ”

“ Nothing can ever cure me, no dream of my mind can ever efface the dream of my heart.—All has been in vain; this anguish is killing me. I feel that my hurt is mortal, my heart pains me as if some one were actually crushing it, were tearing it to pieces. My agony of mind is so great that it has become a physical torment—atrocious, unbearable. ”

“ Soothingly I promised to be careful in the future—sadly I spoke my regrets at the pain I had caused her. I knew too well the vagaries of ill-balanced nerves not to understand that they require no reason to set themselves on edge. ”

“ Your nerves become shattered, unstrung, and sadly out of tune. Your head swims with the slightest pretexts. Your eyes grow wild, and at times glassy, even to ghastliness. Your heart feels never so sad and so lonely; never so deeply in want of another’s sympathy. ”

“ By a line of humorous reflection already suggested, we may in all cases of worry and moral disturbance reach the consolatory idea that the trouble has, in the first view of it, been grossly exaggerated. At the moment when the sensitive tissue is lacerated the shock of pain blinds us to dimensions; our disappointment fills the outlook, like a thunder-storm. The healthy nervous organism will show its vitality in the rapidity of the recuperative process ”

“ Hirn, again, in his work on the origins of art, has an interesting chapter on "The Enjoyment of Pain," a phenomenon which he explains by its resultant reactions in increase of outward activity, of motor excitement. Anger, he observes elsewhere, is "in its active stage a decidedly pleasurable emotion. Fear, which in its initial stage is paralyzing and depressing, often changes in time when the first shock has been relieved by motor reaction.... Anger, fear, sorrow, notwithstanding their distinctly painful initial stage, are often not only not avoided, but even deliberately sought." ”

“ Our nerves enter intimately into every feeling, thought, act of life, into every function of our bodies, into every aspiration of our souls. They determine our digestion and our destinies; they may even influence the destinies of others. Let us turn a few pages of a life and see the cost of defective nervous-living. ”

“ When fury and anger sweep us in their red flame, and gentle, familiar aspects of nature take on the hue of blood, we clench our fists until the nails are driven deep into the flesh. In the first shock of the agony of bereavement, or during those cruel dragging hours when we are adjusting ourselves to living with our hearts torn asunder, we clasp our hands in frenzy. ”

“ It is only a dirge for the dead.
—How your flesh creeps, as the fearfully solemn tones fall on your ears. How icy cold is the blood in your veins—and yet the beaded drops of perspiration stand upon your temples, and in your palms! How stoutly you struggle to feel that you still have your senses; and yet, in your strong agony, you fiercely bite your lip through and through, and know it not. ”

“ My heart was beating rapidly, and I knew enough of the effect of emotion on the cardiac system to understand that it was caused by suspense. A thousand new terrors were in the air of which the experience and the sagacity of man were ignorant. ”

“ Pain I have enough of, but that is indeed to me a mere trifle, but the almost unceasing, overpowering sensations of wretchedness—achings in my limbs, with an indescribable restlessness that makes action to any available purpose almost impossible—and worst of all the sense of blighted utility, regrets, not remorseless. ”

“ Have any of my readers known what it is to feel the heart stop dead still, after one fierce bound into the throat, the body go cold and clammy, like dank, damp clay—like the earth that I leaned up against in that moment of dumb, stricken terror? ”

“ Nor can the nerves alone discriminate; for they can only cry aloud with a blind cry. In the management of this art, what we need is the nerves and the head together, playing up to one another; and, between them, carrying further—always a little further—the silent advance, along the road of experience, of the insatiable soul. ”

“ From the evidence just given it appears that any high degree of excitement in the central nervous system, whether felt as anger, terror, pain, anxiety, joy, grief or deep disgust, is likely to break over the threshold of the sympathetic division and disturb the functions of all the organs which that division innervates. ”

“ The violence of the changed, yet mixed sensations, with which she was now assailed, made every pulse throb with so palpitating a rapidity, that she felt as if life itself was seeking a vent through every swelling vein. ”

“ Either admit fear, feel that the breath of you is slowly but quite surely in process of being crushed out of you, feel that your arms and legs are being torn from you, that your ribs are being smashed into powder and that your heart is being pressed as flat as a pancake, let then panic overwhelm you, fight and scream to get out and away from it, see yourself finally falling, trampled, kicked, your face squashed to pulp, your eyes torn out, your breath strangled in your body ... ”

“ It is so; and, when the dreadful repast is over, then again the pulse beats healthfully, and the wasted energies of a strange kind of vitality are restored to us, we become calm again, but with that calmness comes all the horror, all the agony of reflection, and we suffer far more than tongue can tell. ”

“ In the morbid straining of his abnormally-functioning nerves the Individuum-decadent rises to those mysterious borders where the joy and the pain of human existence pass into one another and intermingle, where the two are brought in their extreme manifestations to a peculiar feeling of destructive rapture, to an ecstatic being outside and above himself. ”

“ Since this test of emotion is fundamentally sound, it is not surprising that the nervous man is in a state of distress. Indigestion, fatigue, over-sensibility, sound like problems in physiology, but we cannot go far in the discussion of any of them without coming face to face with the emotions as the real factors in the case. When we turn to the mental characteristics of nervous folk, we even more quickly find ourselves in the midst of an emotional disturbance. ”