Unreality

“ Try, we may say, to think of the utterly unreal, and see how you will have to conceive it. Can you think of sheer unreality otherwise than as that of which no mind is ever aware, of which no purpose has ever to take account as a condition of its fulfilment? ”

“ Though men hail it as reality, and band thoughts of its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very opposite. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality. ”

“ He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house. ”

“ Let us, in the presence of such hideous machinery, cease to be literal in matters of sentiment, even at the price of a little sadness and cynicism in recognizing the unreality of everything save our own moods and fancies. ”

“ Only there is this curious result: he carries away in his mind the impression of unreality, of a country impossible to be understood and gauged and savoured by the ordinary human mental equipment. It is interesting, just as are historical novels, or the copper-riveted heroes of modern fiction, but it has no real relation with human life. ”

“ There thus emerges a distinction of vast importance, that of truth and falsehood, of reality and unreality, or between representation and reality. There arise two worlds, the world of ideas, and the world of reality which it is supposed to represent, and, in many cases, to represent badly. ”

“ On being transported to strange scenes, we feel as if all were unreal. This is but the perception of the true unreality of earthly things, made evident by the want of congruity between ourselves and them. By and by we become mutually adapted, and the perception is lost. ”

“ Again, certain people have cried illusion and unreality at things political or moral or even at things physical, but only in the end to feel, and to make others feel, first, their evident narrowness, if not their actual dishonesty, and then their need of a more hospitable idea of what is valid and real. ”

“ That which is not so is illusive and fading. My insistence upon a proper understanding of the unreality of matter and evil arises from their deleterious effects, physical, moral, and intellectual, upon the race. ”

“ Alas! are there so few things in the world, about us, most unnatural, and yet most natural in being so? Hear the magistrate or judge admonish the unnatural outcasts of society; unnatural in brutal habits, unnatural in want of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all distinctions between good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice, in recklessness, in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. ”

“ Ninety-nine and ninety-nine one-hundredths of all the interest or charm of all the creatures of the earth and of the circumstances and spaces and conditions in which they find themselves, is the secrecy—or, what is the same, the mystery or subtlety—which attaches to them. We do not know them; we do not understand them; we wonder at their states, their thoughts, their moods, what they will do, which way turn, when attacked, whom attack, whom deceive, whom praise, whom reward. Secrecy—secrecy—mystery. If it were gone the illusion of life itself, which is all that it is, would be gone also. ”

“ The votary of a false idea, I linger in this shadowy life and feed on silent images which no eye but mine can gaze upon, till at length they are invested with the terrible circumstances of life, and breathe, and act, and form a stirring world of fate, beauty, time, death, and glory. ”

“ I saw how, from day to day, from hour to hour, terrible chaos was struggling in their souls with an eager inclination for harmony and order; how in the bloody struggle between eternal falsehood and immortal truth, falsehood, through inconceivable ways, passed into truth, and truth became falsehood. I found in the human soul all the forces in the world, and none of them was dormant, and in the mad whirlpool each soul became like a fountain, whose source is the abyss of the sea and whose summit the sky. ”

“ This world would be a horrible comedy, a causeless illusion, and human existence a jest perpetrated by nothingness,—all would be but a lie, if there were not a just and kind God!... That which is absurd cannot be true. ”

“ But now he saw them crouching under the sky, with still the dark, mysterious world of reality inside, but as a world within a world, a sort of side show, whereas before they had been as a world to him within a chaos: a reality, an order, an absolute, within a meaningless confusion. ”

“ Yet so unconscious were they of weaving this elaborate tissue of illusion around the world they inhabited that they called the mental process by which they distorted the reality, "taking a true view of life." ”

“ He knew illusions so well, for they were his art to convey truth in fiction and reality in abstraction. He liked producing color on canvasses that would act as a mirror of indictment on this world, where the weak were depicted as abused and falling prey to illnesses like the dogs that were born in the streets, kicked, starved, mange-ridden, and dead early and hideously. ”

“ If, indeed, the realities not reflected became unrealities, were annihilated, then there would be some sense in veiling those portions of the mirror in front of which certain features of our life are exposed. ”

“ As, sometimes, in a nightmare events crowd upon each other's heels with a conviction of dreadfulest reality, yet some inconsistent detail accuses the whole display of incompleteness and disguise, so the events that now followed, though they actually happened, persuaded the mind somehow that the detail which could explain them had been overlooked in the confusion, and that therefore they were but partly true, the rest delusion. ”

“ Why are such simulations of nature as wax-work figures of men and women so disagreeable? Because, not finding the motion and the life all we expected, we are shocked as by a falsehood, every circumstance of detail, which before induced you to be interested, making the distance from truth more palpable. You set out with a supposed reality, and are disappointed and disgusted with the deception ”

“ Embellished facts, a mixture of truth and fiction, or what we sometimes meet with, a fictitious superstructure built on a foundation of reality, would be detestable on the score of bad taste, though no moral sense were concerned or consulted. It is walking on a river half frozen that betrays your footing every moment. ”

“ It might even be said that wherever solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy colours are now found in the life of the men and of nations of the world, there is some survival of that horror which was once the universal concomitant of all promises, pledges, and obligations. The past, the past with all its length, depth, and hardness, wafts to us its breath, and bubbles up in us again, when we become "serious." ”

“ The spectacle obliterates the boundaries between self and world by crushing the self besieged by the presence-absence of the world. It also obliterates the boundaries between true and false by repressing all directly lived truth beneath the real presence of the falsehood maintained by the organization of appearances. Individuals who passively accept their subjection to an alien everyday reality are thus driven toward a madness that reacts to this fate by resorting to illusory magical techniques. ”

“ O, deluded heart!—ever bartering away substance for shadow!"
I grow philosophic sometimes. Thought will, now and then, take up a passing incident, and extract the moral. But how little the wiser are we for moralizing! we look into the mirror of truth, and see ourselves—then turn away, and forget what manner of men we are. ”

“ No doubt, a string of horrible incidents, bound together without truth in detail, and told as affecting personages without character,—wooden blocks, who cannot make themselves known to the reader as men and women,—does not instruct or amuse, or even fill the mind with awe. Horrors heaped upon horrors, and which are horrors only in themselves, and not as touching any recognised and known person, are not tragic, and soon cease even to horrify. ”

“ We nibble at the edges of the mystery, and the great Reality—the Incomprehensible—is still untouched, undiscovered. It unfolds hour by hour, day by day, creating, enslaving, killing us, while we painfully gnaw off—what? ”

“ Poor people! the sterility of their imagination is a eulogy on their credulity! I own that, if I had felt the want of persuading my readers I had penetrated into the walled city, I should have adopted a completely different course. My experience of things human taught me, a very long time ago, that the Unknown usually conceals a deception, and I should simply have expressed my surprise at having seen nothing surprising! ”

“ Considered as a tale that is told, it seems to speak of nothing but blind impulse, narrow horizons, insane satisfactions in evil achievement, grotesque miscalculation, and vain desire, till it is almost a relief to reflect how little we know of it all, how immeasurable are the crowded distances beyond the reach of our search-light. Alike the known and the unknown, when all is said, figure for us as fruitless, purposeless, meaningless moments in some vast, eternal dream. ”

“ As spread over a coarse and repulsive moral and physical scenery, it is a subject in the extreme of contrast with that susceptibility of magnificent display, on account of which some of the most cruel evils that have preyed on mankind have ever been favorite themes with writers ambitious to shine in description. Nor does it present a wild and varying spectacle, where a crowd of fantastic shapes (as in a view of the pagan superstitions,) may stimulate and beguile the imagination though we know we are looking on a great evil. ”

“ But this projects us right out of the world of reality into a pure fiction of thought, which, if followed to its conclusion, leads to the most degenerate form of imagination, namely, to pathological individualism. ”

“ Think of me as a novelist out of work, using up my MS. paper. Down here everything has become unreal. You and I, but especially "us"! I want everything to be unreal, I'm not strong enough for more reality. ”

“ Whatever lay beyond the scope of their analysis and defied their laws, they disliked and dreaded. The outlying regions of mystery which hem life in on every side, are inaccessible to the intellect and irreducible in terms of its laws, were strangely repellent to them, and from such shadowy vistas they resolutely turned their eyes and fastened them on the solid ground at their feet. ”

“ No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlike through the world, which is itself so slight and unreal. We crave a sense of reality, though it come in strokes of pain. ”

“ For, as to these dangers, we now know, with extraordinary clearness and certainty, how necessary, constant and far-reaching is, on its phenomenal surface, the auto-suggestive, mono-ideistic power and mechanism of the mind; yet how easily, in some states, too much can be made of such vivid apprehensions and quasi-sensible imagings of invisible reality,—things admirable as means, ruinous as ends. ”

“ Think ye that these moralists, if not hood-winked by false metaphysics, would have so closely copied the malevolence of an inquisitor or a devil?
We must believe that each illusive representation is marked by some change in some certain portion of the brain, the function of which bears a reference to the subject or nature of the illusion: it may be so minute as not to be recognized by our vision. ”

“ I saw that I was in a place where, if the false appeared true, the truth might appear false, where understanding was bereaved of half its prerogatives, where the imagination becoming affected would either make the reason a victim to empty hopes or to dark despair. ”

“ And the feeling and the perception of how superficial and unreal, how oppressively confined, how intolerably fixed and ultimate, how arrogant and cold and fruitless, such persistent neglect of the Data of Sense had somehow, at last, rendered philosophy, gave now polemical edge to men’s zealous study and discovery of this world. ”

“ In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or proportion—of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd—could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony? ”

“ Perhaps I am still adding little, if anything, to what has been said already, but distinctly and emphatically the real world can comprise only things that individually are relative, relatively real or good or true, and that being thus relative secure their place and part in absolute reality only by being also relatively unreal or evil or false. ”

“ And how all thought of fixity in anything had disappeared as a ridiculous illusion intended, maybe, by something to fool man into the belief that his world here, his physical and mental state, was real and enduring, a greater thing than anything else in the universe, when so plainly it was not. ”

“ He does not prepare the reader’s belief by creating the atmosphere of mystery required for illusion. In the midst of the fashionable, real life where they are set, his supernatural incidents lose their effect, and have no vraisemblance. ”

“ We have happily reached an age which is distinguished for its matter of-fact treatment of all that appears mysterious and unusual. Thus we have, by our rigid inquiries into the truth, banished, or almost banished, those dread preventives of progress and civilization—superstition, and belief in the supernatural. ”

“ If I have occasionally given way to those erratic flights of fancy which led me to believe myself a scion of a noble house, well born and nurtured, with wealth at my command and a high station in store, all these delusions were nothing to the creative efforts of her imagination, who commenced by reminding me of a hundred people who never existed, and places and incidents which were all as unreal. ”