Voluptuousness

“ The same unconsciousness of observation inducing the same unstudiedness of action, the whole disposition of the form bore a character of voluptuousness, which the presumed isolation of her who thus exhibited herself, a model of living grace, alone could justify. ”

“ 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 ... ”

“ The voluptuary is like some roving creature, browsing on nettles and living by chance; the worldling is like a beast of burden, now ill-used and over-worked, now fatted, stalled, and richly caparisoned. ”

“ However, this romance of the soul diverted their thoughts from the contemplation of their own misery; and, by a strange magic, the multitude of calamities dispersed throughout the world diminished the sensation of their own miseries. They did not dare complain when all mankind was in a state of sufferance. ”

“ A voluptuary, who tries to justify to himself the weakness of his inclinations, gives no quarter to the mean desires and to the sordid attachments of avarice. A man, mad for exaltation and, fortune, and who considers the eternal exertions which he is under the necessity of making in order to succeed, as weighty and serious cares, and alone worthy his birth and his name, sees all the unworthiness of a life of amusement and pleasure, and clearly comprehends that a man, born with a name, degrades and dishonours himself by laziness and indolence. ”

“ And if the properly human or heavenly growth can never take place without volition, how can the needed volition spring up in the soul of one who has passed the ordeal of judgment, and become thoroughly and supremely selfish? ”

“ I have lov'd some odd Men in my Time, but the whole Race in a Lump, are a dreadful Carnage of Sins and Infirmities, Errors and Failings, Reason and Passion, that make a kind of Twilight in the best Understandings, that is neither Day nor Night, Knowledge or Ignorance, Vice or Virtue ”

“ It is perfectly true; but I think the word "vulgar" is there misplaced, unless we may apply it to all, whether inmates of the palace or the cottage, whose temperament is not of the ultra-refined. Ultra-refined, mind! they of the sensitive, proud, impassioned nature, whose inward life, its thoughts, its workings, can never be betrayed to the world, any more than they themselves can be understood by it. Alas for them! They are hardly fit to dwell on this earth, to do battle with its sins and its cares; for their spirit is more exalted than is well: it may be said, more etherealized. ”

“ Thoughts, black as the chaos of cloud she had so powerfully portrayed, were stirring in his soul,—thoughts, base and mean and cowardly, which, gradually gathering force as he dwelt upon them, began to grow and spring up to a devilish height worked into life and being by a burning spark of jealousy, which, long smouldering in his nature, now leaped into a flame. ”

“ To conclude, after he had reflected, with Horror, on the deplorable Fate of the most amiable Creature in the Universe, and of the most meritorious Queen that ever liv’d; he for a Moment commanded his Passion, and with a Sigh, made the following Exclamations: What is this mortal Life! O Virtue, Virtue, of what Service hast thou been to me! Two young Ladies, a Mistress, and a Wife, have prov’d false to me; a third, who is perfectly innocent, and ten thousand Times handsomer than either of them, has suffer’d Death, ’tis probable, before this, on my Account! ”

“ We will stretch out our hands too late—when we have been caught in its fatal snares, and then in the darkness and misery that will surround us, we will feel how foolish we have been, and our cries of despair and distress will be echoed back to our own ears in sounds of mockery and scorn. ”

“ See the wrong things slay themselves, leaving only Right;
When this little mortal mind gets the larger view.
Cavillings at this and that, censure, doubt and fear,
Fly, as fly before the dawn, insects of the night;
Life and Death are understood; everything seems clear,
All the wrong things slay themselves, leaving only Right. ”

“ You pass from cog-wheel to cog-wheel, from agony to agony, from torture to torture, —you and your mind, your fortune, your future, and your soul; and, according as you are in the power of a wicked creature or of a noble heart, you will issue from this frightful machinery either disfigured by shame or transfigured by passion. ”

“ What, is the other tumult of our soul not enough for us, the tumult that is stirred up, though there be none to stir it up—for example, its outrageous lusts, its griefs and sorrows, and such like—but we must needs heap up a pile of others also? ”

“ Ah, if only you knew the terrible life we lead, we who conspire! Every day brings forth some galling disappointment. We push a king off into the dark, and another rises immediately in his place. Futility, futility everywhere! ”

“ Under the influence of the a priori procedure, both metaphysical and theological, most of us flee with raised hands of horror at sound of the word will. Recollections of "you shall and you shan't, you can and you can't, you will and you won't," crowd round in ever-thickening confusion. Still, it must be said that, apart from all talk about freedom and bondage, volition is a decidedly large fact in human experience. ”

“ And to suppose that the self is to bring order into this chaos, after our experience hitherto of the self’s total impotence, seems more sanguine than rational.
If now we take force or cause, as it is revealed in the self, to be the same as volition proper, that clearly will not help us. For in volition we have an idea, determining change in the self, and so producing its own realization. [4] Volition perhaps at first sight may seem to promise a solution of our metaphysical puzzles. ”

“ For the voluptuary—for the animal man,—who like his four-footed kindred is only conscious of instinctive desire, this pure expansion of the heart and ennobling of the thought is as a sealed book,—a never-to-be-divulged mystery of joy, which, because he cannot experience it, he is unable to believe in. ”

“ Your most sprightly Flights borrow no Graces from Detraction; you never speak a misbecoming Word, nor do an ill-natur’d Action, tho’ ’tis always in your Power. In a Word, your Soul is as spotless as your Person. ”

“ Shall pass uncensured; though the issue prove,
Bringing from age to age its own reproach,
Incongruous, impotent, and blank.—But oh!
If to be weak is to be wretched—miserable,
As the lost Angel by a human voice
Hath mournfully pronounced, then, in my mind,
Far better not to move at all than move
By impulse sent from such illusive Power,
That finds and cannot fasten down; that grasps
And is rejoiced, and loses while it grasps;
That tempts, emboldens—doth a while sustain,
And then betrays ”

“ But, should your passions not extend even to that last hour, the more you delay, the deeper do you allow the roots of guilt to become, the more do your chains form new folds round your heart, the more does that leaven of corruption which you carry within you spread itself, ferment, and corrupt all the capacity of your soul. ”

“ And yet each whispering wind has blown
Abroad the story of my shame.
I dread to see men shrink away
With startled looks of scorn or fear,
When in life’s crowded marts some day,
That name falls on their ear. ”

“ But, poor soul! even as he insists, the agony within rises, breaks up, overwhelms the picture. He lives again through the jars and frets of those few burning days, the growing mistrust of them, the sense of jealous terror and insecurity—and then through the anguish of desertion and loss. ”

“ As of a hungry agonized spirit standing outside its wretched body, and watching its feeble movements, conscious of their futility, conscious of being chained to the miserable thing, and only knowing rebellion and agony. ”

“ And, amidst this general agony of destroying wrath, one central mystery, as a darkness within a darkness, withdraws itself into a secrecy unapproachable by eyesight, or by filial love, or by guesses of the brain—and that is the death of dipus. ”

“ It seems strange; a true voluptuary will never abandon his mind to the grossness of reality. It is by exalting the earthly, the material, the physique of our pleasures, by veiling these ideas, by forgetting them altogether, or, at least, never naming them hardly to one's self, that we alone can prevent them from disgusting. ”

“ Yet, in all these cases, this feeling will rapidly lead the soul on to become unconsciously weak or feverish, unless the latter manfully escapes from this feeling’s tyranny, and nobly bends under the yoke and cramps itself within the narrow limits of the life-giving concrete act. ”

“ His power of resistance, once so vigorous, is now confused—confusion grows to paralysis—he can only now stare, distressed, at the dark temptation, there have swept over him such strong waters that struggle is no longer of avail—one last clutch at the vice, one last desperate and hateful pleasure, and he is gone. ”

“ The purpose of life seemed suddenly clear to him, and the large patience of the sky passed into his own nature as he sat facing the white dawn. At rare intervals in the lives of all strenuous souls there comes this sense of kinship with external things—this passionate recognition of the appeal of the dumb world. ”

“ Is it possible for such feelings to remain smothered for years in the bosom, like the hidden fire of a volcano, without occasional eruptions? Will not such sentiments be very apt to break out in overt acts of disrespect and contempt? ”

“ Page 285 The sense of futility, of the flatness, staleness, and unprofitableness of the world, which is felt in such extreme forms by pronounced melancholiacs, is experienced sometimes, though to a lesser degree, by every sensitive mind that reflects much upon life. ”

“ Then what cries of joy or disappointment broke forth at every instant! There seemed at once to come over that hardened, time-worn group of men all the changing fickleness of childhood,—the wayward vacillations of hope and despair, bright visions of sudden wealth, with gloomy thoughts of disappointment,—when, suddenly, one brought up from the bed of the stream something which he showed to his neighbor, then to another and another, till a knot had gathered close around him, among which I found myself. ”

“ The essential futility of the many moods which went to make up all this, ought not to blind us to the enormous power that was needed for the reproduction of a turbulent and not quite aimless chaos of the soul, in which man seemed to be divorced alike from his brother-men in the present, and from all the long succession and endeavour of men in the past. ”

“ The heart which had felt the divine, in which the desire after the unearthly had awakened, was torn by the vulture, to which revenge had given birth, and which now fed upon the vitals of the presumptuous one. He who has attempted the heavenly, feels earthly pain for ever. ”

“ Thus sunk in gloom, far deeper internally than in outward show—warring with remorse and the sense of unmerited injury—vanquished by fate, yet refusing to yield, nature had reached the acme of suffering. ”

“ My apathy is not natural, but superinduced. There was a volcano under my ice, but it burnt out, and a face of desolation has come on, not to be rectified in ages, could my life be prolonged to patriarchal longevity. ”

“ A volition is the immediate consciousness of the activity of any of the powers of Nature within us. The immediate consciousness of an effort,—an aspiration of these powers which has not yet become a reality because it is hemmed in by opposing powers,—is, in consciousness, inclination or desire; ”

“ In voice and gesture lay the doubt—the temptation of Doubt. How he hated it, and stormed at it furiously! "Of course they are capable," he cried; "of course they can learn and strive and achieve—" and "Of course," added the temptation softly, "they do nothing of the sort." Of all the three temptations, this one struck the deepest. Hate? He had outgrown so childish a thing. Despair? ”

“ He spent his days in sleep, his nights in attending to his official duties or in amusement, by his dissolute life he had become as famous as other men by a life of energy, and he was regarded as no ordinary profligate, but as an accomplished voluptuary. ”

“ The stress of life is transferred from reason and conscience to the senses. The voluptuary exults not in great thoughts and high purposes, but crawls crippled and bedraggled through the sloughs of animalism ”

“ Ahead of her loomed, only dimly discerned as yet, the ordeal of strenuous monotony; the deadly-dull, prolonged grind wherein endurance, as it hardens, is subjected to a constantly harsher strain, until the soul revolts as, in the earlier stage, the body had rebelled. ”

“ He knew that the mind which even best repels temptation first urged hath seldom power to resist the same suggestion, if daily—dropping, unwearying—presenting itself in every form, obtruded in every hour, losing its horror by custom, and finding in the rebellious bosom itself its smoothest vizard and most alluring excuse. ”

“ He is full of his 'Nullification,' and those who know the force that is in him and his utter incapacity for modification by other minds, will no more expect repose and self-retention from him than from a volcano in full force. Relaxation is no longer in the power of his will. ”

“ Nevertheless, even as he was carried, sobbing, into the farther room, there went with him a consciousness that life would never again be quite the dull, purposeless, monotonous thing that it had hitherto been. ”

“ Yet there lay, underneath his own gloomy agony, a remote consciousness of collateral affliction, such as is frequently experienced by those who may be drawn, by some temporary and present pleasure, from the contemplation of their misery. ”