Undressing

“ Do not weep, my darling; do not weep. Life only laughs at our tears, even as it has laughed at our prayers.
[Then, turning once more towards the Being in Grey, he exclaims:]
And for thee—Fate, Life, God, or Devil, whatsoever be thy name—I hereby curse thee!
[As the Man delivers the following curse he stands with one arm outstretched, as though shielding his Wife from danger, while the other arm he extends menacingly towards the Being in Grey.]
The Man's Curse.
Hereby I curse thee, and all that thou hast given me! I curse the day whereon I was born, and the day whereon I shall die! ”

“ Why then do Men shun a Pit or Poison? Or do they fear this the less, because they don't see it? No more is the Poison seen, that a Basilisk darts from his Eyes. When Necessity calls for it, I would not stick to venture my Life: But to do it without any Necessity, is Rashness. There are some other Things worth your seeing; but my Wife shall shew you them: Stay here this three Days if you please, and make my House your Home; entertain your Eyes and your Minds, I have a little Business abroad: I must ride out to some of the Neighbouring Towns. ”

“ If another man hath not slept with thee, and if thou be not defiled by forsaking thy husband’s bed, these most bitter waters, on which I have heaped curses, shall not hurt thee.
5:20. But if thou hast gone aside from thy husband, and art defiled, and hast lain with another man:
5:21. These curses shall light upon thee: The Lord make thee a curse, and an example for all among his people: may he make thy thigh to rot, and may thy belly swell and burst asunder. ”

“ Their victim suffers from unbearable agony. His clothes take fire, his food turns into ordure, his beverages become urine, stones fall in showers on all sides of him, but curiously not on him, and his bed becomes a literal bed of thorns. He feels like a lost man. In this way, with grim delight, the spirit continues to torment his victim by day as well as by night. ”

“ But that is not the worst: as each member of our house succeeds to the ancestral rank and honours, he must seek an interview with 'The Curse,' as it has been styled for generations. And, in that interview, it is decided whether the spell is to be broken and the Curse depart from us for ever—or whether it is to continue its blighting influence, and hold yet another life in miserable thraldom.'
'And are you one of its thralls then, papa?' faltered Chlorine. ”

“ By a sort of intoxication, a species of madness, resulting from the severity of his sufferings, he rushed blindly into new and ever more cruel and senseless torments; aggravating and complicating his miserable state in a thousand ways; passing from perversion to perversion, from aberration to aberration, without being able to hold back or to stop for one moment in his giddy descent. He seemed to be devoured by an inextinguishable fever, the heat of which made all the germs of human lust lying dormant in the hidden depths of his being flourish and grow big. ”

“ Phrases like "to sit on thorns," "to be on pins and needles," "to drain the cup of misery to the dregs," show with graphic power the folly and curse of worry. Why should one sit on thorns, or on pins and needles? If one does so accidentally he arises in a hurry, yet in worrying, one seems deliberately, with intent, to sit down upon prickles in order to compel himself to discomfort, distress, and pain. Is there any wisdom, when one has the cup of misery at his lips, in deliberately keeping it there, and persistently drinking it to the "very dregs"? ”

“ Wrath, hatred, love, pity, desire, recognition, joy, pain, all are names for extreme conditions: the milder, middle stages, and more so. The over-active lower stages escape our attention, and yet it is they which weave the texture of our characters and fate. Those extreme outbursts— and even the most moderate conscious pleasure or displeasure which we may experience while partaking of a dish or hearing a sound is perhaps, if rightly estimated, nothing but an extreme outburst—very often destroy the texture, and then are violent exceptions, mostly in consequence of some congestion ”

“ My uneasiness (whatever may have been the nature of theirs) consisted in a participation in the distresses of those persons, whose private feelings had been so deeply and (as I fear they supposed) cruelly wounded; and in the reflection, that the disgusting subject of human disinterment must be again agitated, commented upon, written upon; a subject which, of all others, whether relating to a necessity or not, ought to be kept profoundly silent, and almost mysteriously secret. ”

“ A still more striking illustration of the position I am now supporting is afforded in another action of these agents. The tendency of their action is, as a rule, toward premature physical death: the tendency is also toward premature mental death. A sudden excess of indulgence by any one of them, save perhaps arsenic, is all but certain to lead to some form of acute mental derangement or stupor, more or less decisive and prolonged. A gradual excessive indulgence is almost as certain to lead to a confirmed condition of aberration more or less determinate. ”

“ We know that an insult will arouse a feeling of resentment in the human breast, but to say how far and in what way it will manifest itself, would require a synthesis which would build up the entire man and all his surroundings, past and present. ”

“ When we remember that this same fictitious indifference characterized the typical grand seigneur of old France, and when we also remember that indifference may be rapidly transformed into insolence, and insolence into cruelty, we may well look grave at the symptoms which we can watch around us. The dreary ennui of the heart, ennui that revolts at truth, that is nauseated by earnestness, expresses itself in what we call slang, and slang is the sign of mental disease. ”

“ Dissection and disinterment are both forgotten and forgiven, when agony distorts the features of a beloved sufferer, or when death seems to be impending over him; and when that science which but for Anatomy (and in the present state of things but for disinterment) could not exist, is ready at hand to relieve from torture, or to snatch from death. ”

“ She was cuddling up to him, her voice quavering, her hand stroking his cheek, in a curious effort to combine affection and punishment at the same time. Duer felt nothing but wrath, resentment, discouragement, failure. ”

“ And I thought any man who had tact enough for that would be my undoing and I should not wonder,” with a swift look from under her long lashes, “if it were true, but you will never tell a soul I told you, will you?” beseechingly. “It’s a secret—the undoing, you know.” ”

“ It is only one who has some approximate notion of the mental and moral sufferings, of the anxieties and perturbations, to which an Urning is exposed, who knows the never-ending hypocrisies and concealments he must practise in order to cloak his indwelling inclination, who comprehends the infinite difficulties which oppose the natural satisfaction of his sexual desire—it is only such a one, I say, who is able properly to wonder at the comparative rarity of mental aberrations and nervous ailments in the class of Urnings. ”

“ Wearied out with such continual insults, and perhaps a little peevish from the fever, I trembled, lest my passion might unawares overleap the bounds of prudence, and spur me to some sudden act of resentment, when death must be the inevitable consequence. ”

“ In many cases, even of the greatest apparent suffering and distress, instead of showing any anxiety to communicate the causes of their distress, or to relate their privations, and their longings for their homes and their friends and relatives, they lay in a listless, lethargic, uncomplaining state, taking no notice either of their own distressed condition, or of the gigantic mass of human misery by which they were surrounded. ”

“ It is clear then that we must regard incontinent people as being in much the same condition as people so affected, i.e. people asleep or mad or intoxicated.—ch. 6., Other such states again are the results of a morbid disposition or of habit, as e.g. the practice of plucking out one’s hair, or biting one’s nails, or eating cinders and earth, or of committing unnatural vice; for these habits are sometimes natural,—when a person’s nature is vicious,—and sometimes acquired, as e.g. ”

“ All that was evil in him came to the surface; the fear that anybody might forcibly frustrate his revenge—if he chose to revenge himself—raised a demon in him that blanched his naturally pallid face and started his lip muscles into that curious recession which, in animals, is the first symptom of the snarl. ”

“ The sentiments of voluptuousness, sorrow and pity, which psychology has studied, appear to betray sometimes a veritable perversion, and to contain as elements the love of sorrow for sorrow itself.... Often one has to do with people who desire their own weal primarily, and then the woe of others. One or other of these psychical states is visible in many cases of wickedness; for example, in the fact of a rich manufacturer falsely accusing a young man, who is going to marry, of being affected by a venereal disease, and maintaining his assertion for the pleasure of doing so ... ”

“ This action of opposing forces with regard to the more primitive aspects of the mind is termed Repression Repression and so far as it manifests itself in consciousness finds its most usual expression in the emotions of disgust, anger and fear. ”

“ But an indifference based on real recklessness, an indifference with a deep flow of loose energy beneath it, ready to break out like a geyser. Ready to break into a kind of frenzy, a berserk frenzy, running amok in wild generosity, or still more wild smashing up. The wild joy in letting loose, in a smash-up. ”

“ The hideous deformity, the rottenness and repulsiveness of the leper Hann is brought out in such vivid detail that we sicken and fain would turn aside in disgust. But go where one will, the ghastly, quivering, wretched picture is always before us in all its filth and splendid misery. ”

“ What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or entangle thy filaments! which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the world—what evils in thy passage into it!—What evils since!—produced into being, in the decline of thy father's days—when the powers of his imagination and of his body were waxing feeble—when radical heat and radical moisture, the elements which should have temper'd thine, were drying up ”

“ To a greater or less extent all these schemes to rescue man from the unquenchable fire and the gnawings of the undying worm, or to justify their infliction, are evoked by shame or horror at the extreme severity of the penalty, and express the modifications which human wisdom and tenderness would interpose or substitute. ”

“ The customs and manners of a vile and rude race, on the contrary, are conditions of decay: they are not, properly speaking, habits, but incrustations; not restraints, or forms, of life; but gangrenes, noisome, and the beginnings of death. ”

“ God help me, if I were to meet him without here, when I go from you, and should he pray me to go with him, I would go—I wot well, too, I have seen now there be other folk who have sinned as well as we—When I was a girl at home ’twas past my understanding how aught could win such power over the souls of men that they could forget the fear of sin ”

“ This indecision was not merely odious, but had something that alarmed her about it, as she had been alarmed slightly once or twice already that day; she felt unable to cope with the strength of her own desires. To a person controlled by habit, there was humiliation as well as alarm in this sudden release of what appeared to be a very powerful as well as an unreasonable force. ”

“ The question of immorality has been set aside, and the indecency has been admitted, but it remains for us to realize that anxiety for sincerity and truth, springing from the sense of pity and justice, makes indecency a condition of portraying human nature so that it may look upon its image and be ashamed. ”

“ Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of{110} God, find the earth below not in unison with these,—but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust,—some of them suicides. ”

“ Did I really deserve the imputations of rashness and insolence? My behaviour, I well know, was ambiguous and hazardous, and perhaps wanting in discretion, but my motives were unquestionably pure. I aimed at nothing but the rescue of a human creature from distress and dishonour.
I pretend not to the wisdom of experience and age ”

“ I felt pleasant in punishing them, telling them straight to their faces the truth about themselves, what sort they were. Is everyone who dares tell the truth mad? I assure you, gentlemen experts, that I was altogether conscious that, when striking, I felt the contact of my hand with a live body experiencing pain. ”

“ Dark brows raised high to the temples, the sharp mocking triangle.
“‘It is more reasonable to annihilate a few than to allow many to poison themselves. . . . And degeneration,’ . . . etc. . . . This is true to the point of indecency.” ”