Suspension

“ The analogy of a person who has been sentenced to imprisonment for a certain period, and who, on the expiration of that period, is at once released, has been referred to, as apposite to the case of a definite suspension. Still more appropriately may we refer to the case of a person transported for a term of years, and who cannot return until that term expires, but who is at liberty at once to do so when it has expired. ”

“ Every suspension of offensive action, either from erroneous views, from fear or from indolence, is in favour of the side acting defensively. ”

“ If it is excessive, the soul is disturbed and bewildered by the many parts of the object, and by being tossed and hurried from one to the other, is not allowed, nor has it leisure, for that extatic suspension, in which the most intense part of the pleasure consists. ”

“ The other punishments and penalties,—suspension, irregularity, aggravation, reaggravation, deposition, lightnings, thunderings, cursings, damnings and the rest of these devices,—should be buried ten fathoms deep in the earth, so that there should be neither name nor memory of them left on earth. ”

“ Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment. ”

“ Toute affaire —e; to the suspension of all other business.
cessation, n.f., cessation, suspension, intermission, discontinuance, stoppage.
cesse, n.f., ceasing, intermission, rest, respite. Parler sans —; to talk for ever.
cesser, v.n., to cease, to leave off, to forbear, to discontinue, to give over, to be at an end, to have done, to intermit, to end. Il ne cesse de pleurer; he never leaves off crying. Faire —; to put a stop to, or an end to. ”

“ Suspense, more wearing even than sorrow, had held him on the rack. Sleep had seldom visited his eyes; and when it came, it had been broken and fitful.
Now the worst had befallen him. Suspense was over; certainty had come. This brought at first a kind of rest to the overtaxed mind and frame. He was as one who hears a sentence of death, but who is taken off the rack. ”

“ Of all the conditions to which the heart is subject, suspense is the one that most gnaws, and cankers into, the frame. One little month of that suspense, when it involves death, we are told, in a very remarkable work lately published by an eye-witness. [Note: See Mr. Wakefield's work on 'The Punishment of Death.'] is sufficient to plough fixed lines and furrows in the face of a convict of five-and-twenty—sufficient to dash the brown hair with grey, and to bleach the grey to white. And this suspense—suspense of this nature, for more than eight whole months, had Madeline to endure! ”

“ Suspense is itself a species of calamity. It has all the poignant acuteness of hope without the buoyancy of a sustained expectation, and all the anguish of despair without its sense of conclusiveness and the surcease of striving. Pending the review of the action of the court-martial Baynell discovered the wondrous scope of human suffering disassociated from physical pain. ”

“ My forebodings might possibly be groundless. All within might be safety and serenity. A respite might be gained from the execution of an irrevocable sentence. What could I do? Was not any thing easy to endure in comparison with the agonies of suspense? If I could not obviate the evil I must bear it, but the torments of suspense were susceptible of remedy.
I drew back the bolt, and entered with the reluctance of fear, rather than the cautiousness of guilt. ”

“ For it is only when we have suspended our judgment; it is only when we have suspended our convictions, our principles, our ideals, our moralities, that "the still small voice" of the music of the universe, sad and sweet and terrible and tender, drifts in upon us, over the face of the waters of the soul. ”

“ If you build up a series of mysterious incidents, the solution must be adequate to the suspense. But, I have treated this angle of secret-keeping in "preparation versus result," so I shall now direct your attention to the other side of the problem of dramatic frankness—which may be the cause of the lack of punch:
2. Have You been too Frank at the Beginning?
Go back through the early moments of your playlet and see if you have not given the whole thing away at the very beginning. If you have, you have, as we saw, killed your suspense, which is the road on which punch lies in wait. ”

“ We have had not only one incident for every day in the week, but two or three; we have not simply been stunned with the alarming noise of one terrific clash, but another, and another, and another, have followed upon each other's heels, like Job's messengers, till we have needed Job's patience and resignation to hear the dreadful tale of woes. ”

“ Suspense is irksome, disappointment bitter. ”

“ In this miserable banishment I passed six years, embittered by the most dreadful account of my family, every member of it, even in the remotest degree, having transgressed the laws of his country, and was then undergoing for his offences the punishment awarded to him. Could hope under any form have presented herself to me, I felt that I might yet be a reclaimed man, but I could not catch the most distant glimpse of her. ”

“ III. If it be in the present life, and from the ordinary coursed of nature, not purposely modified by the interposition of these will of any human being, nor by any extraordinary interposition of any superior invisible being, that the pleasure or the pain takes place or is expected, it may be said to issue from or to belong to the physical sanction. ”

“ It seemed as if humanity could not stand the dreadful punishment that nature was inflicting upon these intrepid men. The game was too fierce for a few, and these by sheer exhaustion fell by the wayside. ”

“ For trifling offenses which in our day would be punished by a small fine or a few days’ confinement, men, women, and boys were sent to this other end of the earth to serve terms of seven and fourteen years ”

“ Turning a street corner, we encounter suddenly a bitter wintry blast; we feel at once an arrest upon our movements. An ill odour, a painful contact, a grating noise, a disagreeable spectacle, have all the same immediate efficacy. The proper, the direct consequent of an incursion of pain, is suspended activity. Not only is this second law conformable to observation, it is the implication, the obverse, of the previous law connecting pleasure with increased activity. ”

“ Now shutting out things is all very well, but it has one simple corollary--that from everything that we shut out we are ourselves shut out. When we shut our door on the wind, it would be equally true to say that the wind shuts its door on us. ”

“ Some are easily kept and bruised, but others are with difficulty taken and continually in motion. But all are extremely impatient of restraint and cannot bear it. Confinement is death to the body from which it has issued! ”

“ The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless, till it is driven by external causes into a new channel. But the time of suspense is dreadful. ”

“ It seemed that he had been counting for hours, his will against her will, the man in him against the woman in her, and during the pauses between the sound of his voice the very air grew charged with waiting. ”

“ So one feels when one walks along a bit of road surrounded with walls, a cul de sac from which there is no outlet. A sense of imprisonment is in it, of discouragement, too little air to breathe, too little space to move in—certainly a disagreeable, stifling, choking sensation. ”

“ There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage, If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail the long run, We should surely bring up again where we now stand, And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther. ”

“ A suffering which befalls a man in the natural and spontaneous course of things, shall be styled, for instance, a calamity; in which case, if it be supposed to befall him through any imprudence of his, it may be styled a punishment issuing from the physical sanction. ”

“ We look on with intense agony of suspense, to see whether it will stand the terrible ordeal, and outlive the unexampled convulsion of social elements in which its strength and endurance have been so sorely tested. ”

“ The ‘dead pause abrupt of mighty winds’ is the pause of mighty winds and not of gentle breezes; and it is not the absence of mighty winds, but their pause before they burst into renewed fury; or if their silence is not their will, it is a silence imposed on them by something mightier even than they. ”

“ Let there be at once also the end of the world! O God! if that is to be my punishment, I swear I will go away, never to see her again in life,—only save her! ”

“ In the first place, I am going to assume that we have no need to talk about punishment; perhaps you’ve had a reasonable amount of it as it is, for I suspect you have passed some very trying hours. At the same time, though, I’m not prepared to treat this affair as a wholly closed chapter. ”

“ Well, you see, sir, whenever we tear or lose any of our clothes, we have to remain in perfect confinement for a week or more, sometimes in darkness; it depends on the nature of the article we have lost or torn. ”

“ So much of the dregs is return'd into the blood, the tediousness of the confinement, that it becomes a sure hostage and the leaven of another unwelcome visit, always too early, most frequently before we are throughly recover'd of our last. ”

“ The only inconvenience it occasions, as they tell us, is a slight tendency of the blood to the face, a soft suffusion, which, however, is very transient, since nothing is said by those whom they join calculated to deepen the red on the cheek, but a prudent silence is observed in regard to all the past. ”

“ Such activities bring pleasure when unimpeded, and pain when sharply interrupted by a start or blunder which jars upon us. Putting this latter case in language which {218} carries out the analogy to punishment, we might say that the formed habit of action, unconsciously or semi-consciously relevant to the end or fuller life, is obstructed by some partial start of mind, and their conflict is accompanied with recognition, pain, and vexation. ”

“ There seemed a tension in the air—as if something was going to snap. Doubtless you have often felt it—a sensation as though pins and needles were pricking you all over. As though you wanted to scream—to cry out—against an uncertain sensation that gripped you. ”

“ My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it. I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between 10 and 4 without ease or interposition. ”

“ The pleasantest thing becomes painful, if it is felt as a restraint. What can be cosier than the warm environment of sheet and blanket which encircles you in your snug bed? Yet if you awake during the night at some alarm of peril, and by a sudden effort try at once to shake yourself clear of these trammels, you will, for the half-minute before you succeed, feel that soft restraint as irksome as iron fetters. ”

“ Suppression is a process of reaction to the pleasures and pains which are immediately present, and takes no account of the more extended experience with which it is the function of intelligence to deal. ”

“ When we slowly recover from the tumult and passion of some violent distress, a peculiar stillness falls upon the Mind, and the atmosphere around it becomes in that stillness appallingly clear. We knew not, while wrestling with our woe, the extent of its ravages. ”

“ By a well-directed silence I have sometimes seen threatening and troublesome persons routed,—unconsciously and innocently, no doubt. You sit musing, as if you were in broad nature again; they cannot stand it; their position becomes more and more uncomfortable every moment. So much humanity over against one without any disguise,—not even the disguise of speech! With a little silence, things take shape as they should. ”

“ We must not have recourse to cupping at the commencement of complaints, nor when the body is in a plethoric state, but when the general system has been evacuated, and when there is no defluxion any longer to the part, and especially when there is a necessity of removing, dislodging, and determining something outwardly. ”

“ But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour,—then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain! That’s the point—the certainty of it. Just that instant when you place your head on the block and hear the iron grate over your head—then—that quarter of a second is the most awful of all. ”

“ Nay, we may further add another simile, although not so well borne out, which is, that the agony of suspense doth stop the breath of a man for the time, as hanging doth stop it altogether, so that it may be truly said, that suspense is put an end to by suspending.” (cluck, cluck.)
“And now that you’ve got rid of all that, master, suppose you fill up your pipe,” observed old Tom.
“And I will fill up your tumbler, sir,” said Mary; “for you must be dry with talking such hard words.” ”

“ Suppression is only one form of forgetting -- a form in which the forgetting is especially complete -- and light should be thrown upon the nature of suppression by a general study of the process by which we forget. ”