Shallowness

“ I wander less in my thoughts, am less dissipated, am aware how shallow was the current of my thoughts before. Deep streams are dark, as if there were a cloud in their sky; shallow ones are bright and sparkling, reflecting the sun from their bottoms. ”

“ The delights and pains of the flesh, the agonies and raptures of the soul, these are fragmentary meteors fallen from thought’s harmonious system. But these burning experiences—how in any sense can they be mere pieces of thought’s heaven? For, if the fall is real, there is a world outside thought’s region, and, if the fall is apparent, then human error itself is not included there. ”

“ You may think it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.—I know: only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.—Lost? There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way. ”

“ From the depth of that hideous chasm, the profundity of which no mortal eye could measure, and no human being could contemplate without awe and terror, we heard a strange, buzzing sound, as if from the bowels of the inner earth, far—heaven alone knew how far—down below. ”

“ Here is where the weak-hearted of our earth fail, and, looking not to the mountains, become at last settled in the valley, and suffer even to the end, borne down by the fettering chains of a life which is, at best, only breathing. ”

“ What a thrill passes through the living, as it bends over the inanimate body, from which the spirit has departed! The clay that returns to the dust from which it sprung, the tenement that was lately endued with volition and life, the frame that exhibited a perfection of mechanism, deriding all human power, and confounding all human imagination, now an inanimate mass, rapidly decomposing, and soon to become a heap of corruption. ”

“ For that dread land began to close us in,
With cold and hunger, bit at our poor limbs,
Till life grew there a feeble, flickering flame,
Amid the snows and ice-floes of that land.
Then ten days crept out shrunk and gray and wan,
With nothing but the lonely, haunted waste.
Then spake the leader, “If in five more days!”
Then parcelled out those five gray, haggard days,
While life to me grew like an ebbing tide,
That surged far out from some dread death-like strand. ”

“ When the shallow comes down to the earth his path is no longer that of the immortals, his way is as the way of men, constantly obstructed, and made a thousandfold more difficult by the velocity of his passage. ”

“ The monotony of progress through this unreal, leaden world became almost unbearable. The repeated strainings and twistings they suffered in walking the slippery ridge reduced the men to weariness; their legs grew clumsy and their feet uncertain. ”

“ That day the old beliefs rose up and asserted themselves, and the earth was flat again—ditch-riddled, stagnant, and deadly flat. The undeviating roads crawled straight and white, elms dressed themselves stiffly along inflexible hedges, all nature, centrifugal no longer, sprawled flatly in lines out to its farthest edge, and I felt just like walking out to that terminus, and dropping quietly off. ”

“ When I stood on my native hills, and saw plain and mountain stretch out to the utmost limits of my vision, speckled by the dwellings of my countrymen, and subdued to fertility by their labours, the earth's very centre was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was as a fable, to have forgotten which would have cost neither my imagination nor understanding an effort. ”

“ Heaven and earth were one reek of stinging, whirling snow that drifted in through cracked shutters and ill-fitting hatches to poverty and rags, and pierced under eaves and doors to wealth and fur-bordered mantles. ”

“ The outlines become blurred, the vision fades, the cries and sighs faint away ... and nothingness, nothingness encircles me.... The monotony of empty space, of inert thought, of dreamy lassitude! and more than all the monotony of an idle pen and lifeless paper that lacks the life of thought! Ah! How varied are the shapes of nothingness, and how, in its dark and silent way, it mocks creatures of my stamp! ”

“ Why may not the violent pains of the mind bear some analogy to them—those tempests of sorrow which tear up every pleasure by the root, and sweep away the very soil whence new ones might have sprung, leaving nothing but the bare old rock behind? ”

“ Some day we shall be amazed. As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emerge naturally from the zone of distress. The obliteration of misery will be accomplished by a simple elevation of level. ”

“ It was an area of darkness that had taken the place of light; of burrowings far down in the earth where men (and women and children once) grubbed dully and breathlessly for poor wages on which to sustain life, life that was mostly the same dull grubbing above the surface as below. ”

“ Again, in the story of the earth, as told by geology, do we not also experience the same sense of dismay, and the soul shrinking back on itself, when we come in imagination to those deserts desolate in time when the continuity of the race was broken and the world dispeopled? ”

“ And yet this world, so attractive in its multiplicity of details, is almost a chaos at the first sight; a confused and inextricable mass, so large, so high, so deep as to defy human effort to compass or master it. ”

“ You can comprehend how one becomes tired of the very stones of a place,—the odours, the colours, the shapes of Shadows, and the tint of its sky;—and how small irritations become colossal and crushing by years of repetition;—yet perhaps you will not comprehend that one can become weary of a whole system of life, of civilization, even with very limited experience. ”

“ The whole length of this land in sight was the very symbol of distortion. Pendent from an even line that stretches along the heavens was a ridge of mountains. 'Life hangs upon a little thread,' but what think you of mountains hanging upon a thread? ”

“ What is it that you are concealing beneath the surface of your stagnant water? for you are like stagnant pools which men believe to be deep, though they would not drown a cat! To think that you should be such a mighty, undeveloped force, a force which might mould the future, and yet you lie about as inert as logs of wood! ”

“ And while meridian fervors beat,
Thine is the woodland dumb retreat;⁠10
But chief when evening scenes decay
And the faint landscape swims away,
Thine is the doubtful soft decline,
And that best hour of musing thine. ”

“ In the hush of my mountained vastness, in the flush of my midnight skies.
Plague-spots, yet tools of my purpose, so natheless I suffer them thrive,
Crushing my Weak in their clutches, that only my Strong may survive. ”

“ It is strange, if—living here alone amid the snows, removed from the contagious vices of mankind, from the coarse sensuality, the brutality, the debasement too often found in the world, from the temptations, the struggles, the strife produced by want, envy, ambition, the love of gain; constantly familiar with the ever varying face of primitive nature, with her grandest and loveliest aspects—the mind be not elevated, and the soul pure. ”

“ Walking silent, with insensible footfall, slowly, for the snow is deep above our ankles, we wonder what the world would be like if this were all. Could the human race be acclimatised to this monotony (we say) perhaps emotion would be rarer, yet more poignant, suspended brooding on itself, and wakening by flashes to a quintessential mood. ”

“ Little troubles have only disturbed the surface of our nature, making it uneasy, and tossing it into fretful eddies; this heavy calamity, like a mighty wind, has plunged into the very depths, and turned up the foundations, leaving us, at length, purified and serene. ”

“ Yes, this is the earth; there is no change—no ruin—no rent made in her verdurous expanse; she continues to wheel round and round, with alternate night and day, through the sky, though man is not her adorner or inhabitant. Why could I not forget myself like one of those animals, and no longer suffer the wild tumult of misery that I endure? ”

“ I wonder myself sometimes whether this old globe of ours is going to collapse suddenly and take us with her, or whether we will disappear through slow disastrous ages of fighting and crushing, with hunger and blight to help us to the end. ”

“ And so to both him and her in the darkness and stillness of the desert, within a few steps only of quiet, comfortable, commonplace civilisation, came like a whirlwind a perfect tumult of bewildering emotions, and all the deathless forces which never slumber or sleep in their work of moulding the soul of man, leapt from silence into speech. ”

“ Their minds become hard and cold, like the rocks which they cultivate. The immensity of their mountains makes the human form appear little and insignificant. Men are seen crawling between Heaven and earth, like insects to their graves. ”

“ How can the sap through the branches run?
The natural look of human faces
Is altered. Delicate thoughts are fled.
Torn and gashed in blood-strewn places,
More than the heart can count lie dead. ”

“ I once knew an awakened sinner who described himself as enclosed in the centre of a granite mountain, no room to move a muscle, no seam or crevice through which one ray of light could reach him—picture of utter helplessness and absolute despair! ”

“ And it is equally clear that we experience every hour the effects of our fall and ruin. What, then, comes to us from all this chaos and wild confusion, in a voice of irresistible conviction, but the irrefragable truth of both those sides of humanity? ”

“ Big were the forests, limitless, seeming as vast as infinity itself, resting heavy and still upon a man’s soul. The feeling of last night, the loneliness, the sort of unnamed dread came back upon John Sheldon. ”

“ As I gazed at him I could not help fancying that time makes less impression on men of coarse, unfeeling mould, than on natures of a finer temper. The world's changes leave no trace on the stern surface of the one, while they are wearing deep tracks of sorrow in the other. ”

“ Now it seemed to me, out there in spirit on the hill, that the darkest imaginings of men—the blackest phantom or image of himself which he has sacrificed to—was not so dark as this dreadful unintelligible and unintelligent power that made us, in which we live and move and have our being. ”

“ These dark channelled rocks, worn, as with eternal tears,—these traces, so evident of ancient and vast desolations,—suggest the idea of boundless power and inexorable will, before whose course the most vehement of human feelings are as the fine spray of the cataract. ”

“ Objects no longer glitter in the dews of morning, neither are yet softened by the shadows of evening. Every spot is seen, every chasm revealed. Climbing the dusty hill, some fair effigies that once stood for human destiny have been broken. ”

“ Thus, under the various streams, now cold, now warm, the surface of society melts and forms that smooth icy rind of form over which the light-foot glides carelessly, unconscious that beneath the thin surface are hidden depths in which the philosopher and psychologist find material enough for the study of a whole life. ”

“ While we dare only come near the edge, and, balancing ourselves a while, look off, and our head swims, and our breath catches,—those can tell the story best who have fallen to the depths with wilder dash than glacier from the top of a Swiss cliff, and stand, in their agony, looking up for a relief that comes not, and straining their eyes for a hope that never dawns—crying, "O God!" ”

“ I thought myself entering upon a new scene of nature, but nature rough and unpolished. Men, manners, habits, buildings, everything different from our own; and if we thought them rude and barbarous, no doubt the people had the same opinion of what belonged to us, and the wonder was mutual. ”

“ Yet we have experienced almost as strong emotions of vagueness, terror, sublimity, strength, and beauty while gazing upon the vast panorama of groups and clusters of chaotic peaks that stretch away in almost endless variety of form in confused and disorderly arrangement. ”

“ The glaciers move, the land rises, and the land falls; there is no hurry here. But since my consciousness cannot associate fact with such a conception, it grows blind with fury and revolts: The ruin cannot move ”

“ We went even so far in the insanity of our weakness as to throw out of the garden of our souls the fruitful soil that had been accumulating for thousands of years, or else we plowed it under sterile clay. ”

“ Like a spring issuing from an elevated spot and diffusing its waters, according to the height, from ledge to ledge, until it finally reaches the low ground, so does the tendency of mind or of soul in a people, due to race, epoch, or environment, diffuse itself in different proportions, and by regular descent, over the different series of facts which compose its civilization. ”

“ It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories; how little exercised we have been in our minds; how few experiences we have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing, apace and rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,—though it be with struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. ”

“ Those who had lain longest rose, took up their burdens, and went groaning over the sky-line and out of sight. Every moment new faces, purple with effort or white with exhaustion, rose out of the depths—all were bitten deep with lines of physical suffering. ”