Vanishing point

“ Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity! even in the presence of death, and among men ready to die for an exalted idea. Is not vanity the characteristic trait, the destructive ill of our age? Why has this weakness not been recognized hitherto, just as small-pox or cholera has been recognized? ”

“ To the flight of time he grew quite oblivious, his thoughts wandering in the past, oddly afar to half-remembered scenes, to experiences more than half-forgotten, both wholly irrelevant; picturesque and painful memories cast up from the deeps of the subconsciousness by some inexplicable convulsion of the imagination. For a long time he moved on in stupid, wondering contemplation of a shining crescent of sand backed by a green, steaming wall of jungle ”

“ But once more, at a coigne of vantage on the opposite side of the gorge, and the experience can be utilized in differentiating the elements that go to make up the weird presentment of a human countenance. ”

“ That was just as it should be; but then came the dismaying thought—everything slips away, crumbles, vanishes; Sèvres dinner-services get broken; even golden basins go unaccountably astray; even one's self, with all the recollections and experiences that make up one's being, fluctuates, perishes, dissolves ... ”

“ On the other hand, as the years increase, things look smaller, one and all; and Life, which had so firm and stable a base in the days of our youth, now seems nothing but a rapid flight of moments, every one of them illusory: we have come to see that the whole world is vanity! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Oh, the footfalls! the footfalls! Each tread marks a good or a wicked thought. A fiend or an angel starts beneath every heel. They write an eternal [255] record as they go. Their voices float forever to witness against or for us. We people space as we cleave it. The ground that is dumb as we spurn it has a memory and a revenge. I am more sensitive than my kind; and my penance to these monitors of my sin is but a realization of the terror which all must feel at the accusation of their footfalls. ”

“ Had not the wisest of men taught us this lesson, that all is vanity and vexation of spirit, yet our owne experience would soon have speld it out; for what do we obtain of all these things, but it is with labour and vexation? When we injoy them it is with vanity and vexation; and, if we loose them, then they are lesse then vanity and more then vexation: so that we have good cause often to repeat that sentence, vanity of vanityes, vanity of vanityes, all is vanity. ”

“ To this vanity, then, is the creature subject, that creature especially which, being assuredly the greatest in this world, holds also a distinguished principality of labour, i.e., the sun, and moon, and stars, are said to be subject to vanity, because they are clothed with bodies, and set apart to the office of giving light to the human race. ”

“ As I was here airing myself on the tops of the mountains, I fell into a profound contemplation of the vanity of human life; and passing from one thought to another: Surely, said I, man is but a shadow and life a dream. ”

“ And so hark to the moan of the waves as they draw off, when the tide has turned, and the disenchantment has come, sigh after sigh, moan upon moan, in the weary and desolate retreat. “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” ”

“ In those words, my son, I grieve to read yet something remaining of your origin. They betray just a trace of the vanity which so perniciously opposed justice and progress in that transition age. It forms the one great lesson learnt from our valuable records. The nearer we approach the primordial savage the greater the amount of vanity we find. None can say either the immense length of time required to bring humankind even to the stage of improvement, with which you feel so dissatisfied or the probably still longer period to come during which progress will continue. ”

“ The theme of this symphony of pessimism is stridently announced in the first notes of the overture: "Vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities! Everything is vanity." The world and its happenings, man and his strivings, pleasure, pain, wisdom, folly, good and evil—all is utterly empty; existence has no meaning and no worth. All is chance and change, in which things endlessly go round and round, but plan, purpose, progress is nowhere to be seen. ”

“ Will they then recognize, and so soon, that Time and the elements have an indefeasible claim upon their bodies? Not improbably they may. There must have been shadows enough, even amid the primal sunshine of their existence, to suggest the thought of the soul's incongruity with its circumstances. ”

“ You feel as if you were at the bottom of some tremendous abyss, with all the world far above you. You wind in and out and here and there, in the most mysterious way, and have no more idea of the points of the compass than if you were a blind man. ”

“ ONE CERTAINTY. SONNET. Vanity of vanities, the Preacher saith, All things are vanity. The eye and ear Cannot be filled with what they see and hear. Like early dew, or like the sudden breath Of wind, or like the grass that withereth, Is man, tossed to and fro by hope and fear: So little joy hath he, so little cheer, Till all things end in the long dust of death. To-day is still the same as yesterday, To-morrow also even as one of them ”

“ It is not that the obscurity of vision, confusion of results and uncertainty of doubt which befogs life today darkened the path in the same way fifty years ago, but time has removed the obscurity and the original appears. Could we live another fifty years, might not the cloud which now befogs our path have vanished and we again remember the glance of recognition of yesterday, which now seems hard to recall. ”

“ And when they reached their cells, Hermann flung his books into a corner and cried, "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity; vain instruments of vain learning, farewell! Of what use is it to climb a few steps higher than our fellow-men, if all are to be levelled again at the bar of God so soon?" ”

“ It was therefore necessary, before everything else, and at all risks, that I should cause all traces of the past to disappear—that I should destroy every material vestige: too much reality would always remain in my recollection. ”

“ They sometimes become muddy by passing through ground which is not firm, and which they bear away with them by their rapidity. Sometimes they appear to be irrecoverably lost, then they reappear for a time, but it is only to precipitate themselves in another abyss, still deeper than the former one. ”

“ By the contents of this letter you may perceive, that the cause of all hath been the vanity which possesseth many who (making a perpetual mansion of this poor baiting-place of man’s life) are desirous to know the certainty of things to come, wherein there is nothing so certain as our continual uncertainty. ”

“ But I will not look at the abyss, and maybe she has not seen it! If occasionally I can see her in the street or at the window, it gives me a happiness I have not strength to renounce! At the idea that I must go away, and go away for long, I become insane! ”

“ To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be—Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity—to feel these things and know them is to conquer them. ”

“ At length, when two years were over and her mourning in no wise abated, my curiosity became aroused; so going one day to the Temple of Lamentation I entered unannounced, and placing myself where I might see and not be seen, there I discovered her in an abandonment of fond weeping over her miserable treasure whose very life was a dishonour to us both. ”

“ It may be that a sentiment of vanity alone is the impulse which has determined me to this attempt; yet I do not think it is entirely that,—except as vanity is a natural and healthy quality and is allied to ambition. What is ambition? Is it not an instinctive rebellion against the little term of existence which is accorded to us, the soul’s struggling against mortality,—the longing to leave something behind us so that we shall not be utterly snuffed out? ”

“ But if, by an accidental and favorable grouping of circumstances, the accumulated layers are pushed to one side, then, of course, that which was hidden beneath must appear, after whatever lapse of time, in its original and still existent vividness. [1]
For others [2] the ideas, the persisting images, suffer changes more and more affect their nature; the concept of obscuration comes in here. Older ideas are repressed and forced to sink down, so to speak, by the more recent ones. As time passes one of these general qualities, inner clearness and intensity of consciousness, suffers damage. ”

“ Indeed this art of plausibly reconstructing the mood and atmosphere of the dead past is a most subtle one. Strangely enough any attempt at exact realism almost inevitably destroys the sense of reality, the best effects being won, it would seem, by vagueness and omission. ”

“ But, no doubt, such a change is just of the character to upset us, to disturb us; for, during the change, while shifting from the old position to the new, we are in the very chaos of confusion; everything seems, for the moment, to be tumbling about around us: the entire scene grows unsteady; though, indeed, when once we have got our feet firmly placed at the new level of vantage, much, that once was familiar, is discovered to be back again in its place, looking much the same as of old. ”

“ Of course that particular sickness of the mind is only one of its fruits. How seldom do you find anyone who hath ever attempted to look on his own life with something like the eye of eternity! But without at least some detachment, vanity is bound to grow. ”

“ Vanity is again the note of his abdication, when he calls for a mirror in which to behold the face that has borne such sorrow as his, and then in a fit of almost childish rage dashes the glass upon the ground. ”

“ Successively and in concert, vanity wounded to the quick, sickening self-pity, and implacable, grinding regret laid hold on her heart and soul and worried them till she had to bury her face in the pillow and sink her teeth into it to keep from screaming. ”

“ Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost—something's left behind. ”

“ Here we have those few and detached inexplicable affairs that neither astuteness nor diligence, time nor patience, frenzy nor faith can penetrate—the true romances, the genuine mysteries of vanishment. A man goes forth to his habitual labor and between hours he is gone from all that knew him, all that was familiar. There is a gap in the environment and many lives are affected, nearly or remotely. No one knows the why or where or how of his going and all the power of men and materials is hopelessly expended. Years pass and these tales of puzzlement become legends. ”

“ You immediately look at the worst side when endless possibilities are open to you. Do you wonder that the future looks black to you in such circumstances? But the most annoying part is that you demoralise those around you. ”

“ For man is vanity, his days are as a shadow, saith the psalmist. And the preacher, whose text is vanity of vanities, all is vanity, finds vexation of spirit in meditations on man, all the days of whose vain life he spendeth as a shadow.
What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue! The exclamation was that of a great statesman, amid the excitement and the contests of public life, when there reached him news of the sudden death of a fellow-candidate and colleague. Shadow-hunted shadows. The pursued and the pursuers—the game and the sportsmen—shadows all. ”

“ But when we are distracted we loathe most the thought of retracing our steps. He recalled a white building, ornamented with inscriptions which glistened in the evening and in whose transparent mysticism his mind's eye had lost itself—and then that strange wanderer's form which had awakened in the aging man the roving hankerings of youth after the foreign and the remote. And the thought of return, the thought of prudence and soberness, effort, mastery, disgusted him to such an extent that his face was distorted with an expression of physical nausea. ”

“ Those doubts and uncertainties, which at some time or another assail all men, and with a great many form a silent background or framework for the events of their mournful odyssey, were with us continually present; and however gloomy a view one may take of the universe, one wishes to be able to escape from it at times. ”

“ I feel my sides pressed hard, and bored with points of knotty inferences piled up one upon another without being able ever to recollect myself, or catch a glimpse of the actual world without me. I am somehow wedged in between different rows of material objects, overpowering me by their throng, and from which I have no power to escape, but of which I neither know nor understand any thing. ”

“ Then turning round, he went forth wrathfully, and his companions with him; then when he began to cry out, "Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity!" then from all directions men of all countries and nations, kings and queens from distant lands, collected around him. ”

“ The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote. ”

“ Mists hide the mountains from us, the present hides the past; but there are times when the present does not exist at all, when every mist is cleared away, and the past confronts us in naked outline, and that perhaps is why it is so painful to me to return home. ”

“ There was little room in his mood for sustained thought: his wits were fathoming a bottomless pit of black despair. He felt like a man born blind, through skilful surgery given the boon of sight for a day or two, and suddenly and without any warning thrust back again into darkness. ”