Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  For the first two days after his wife's departure Alexey Alexandrovitch received applicants for assistance and his chief secretary drove to the committee, and went down to dinner in the dining-room as usual. Without giving himself a reason what he was doing, he strained every nerve of his being for those two days, simply to preserve an appearance of composure, and even of indifference. Answering inquiries about the disposition of Anna Arkadyevna's rooms and belongings, he had exercised immense self-control to appear like a man in whose eyes what had occurred was not unforeseen nor out of the ordinary course of events, and he attained his aim; no one could have detected in him signs of despair. But on the second day after her departure, when Korney gave him a bill from a fashionable draper's shop, which Anna had forgotten to pay, and announced that the clerk from the shop was waiting, Alexey Alexandrovitch told him to show the clerk up. 'Excuse me, your excellency, for venturing to trouble you. But if you direct us to apply to her excellency, would you graciously oblige us with her address?' Alexey Alexandrovitch pondered, as it seemed to the clerk, and all at once, turning round, he sat down to the table. Letting his head sink into his hands, he sat for a long while in that position, several times attempted to speak and stopped short. Korney, perceiving his master's emotion, asked the clerk to call another time. Left alone, Alexey Alexandrovitch recognised that he had not the strength to keep up the line of firmness and composure any longer. He gave orders for the carriage that was awaiting him to be taken back, and for no one to be admitted, and he did not go down to dinner. He felt that he could not endure the weight of universal contempt and exasperation, which he had distinctly seen in the face of the clerk and of Korney, and of every one, without exception, whom he had met during those two days. He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better), but from his being shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog yelping with pain. He knew that his sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them, and instinctively he tried to do this for two days, but now he felt incapable of keeping up the unequal struggle.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He sighed, and flung his head up, and began to feel afraid he could not bear it, that he would burst into tears or run away. Such agony it was to him. And only one hour had passed. But after that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his sufferings, and the position was still unchanged; and he was still bearing it because there was nothing to be done but bear it; every instant feeling that he had reached the utmost limits of his endurance, and that his heart would break with sympathy and pain. But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still hours more, and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense. All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one can form no conception of anything, had ceased to exist for Levin. He lost all sense of time. Minutes—those minutes when she sent for him and he held her moist hand, that would squeeze his hand with extraordinary violence and then push it away—seemed to him hours, and hours seemed to him minutes. He was surprised when Lizaveta Petrovna asked him to light a candle behind a screen, and he found that it was five o'clock in the afternoon. If he had been told it was only ten o'clock in the morning, he would not have been more surprised. Where he was all this time, he knew as little as the time of anything. He saw her swollen face, sometimes bewildered and in agony, sometimes smiling and trying to reassure him. He saw the old princess too, flushed and overwrought, with her grey curls in disorder, forcing herself to gulp down her tears, biting her lips; he saw Dolly too and the doctor, smoking fat cigarettes, and Lizaveta Petrovna with a firm, resolute, reassuring face, and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a frowning face. But why they came in and went out, where they were, he did not know. The princess was with the doctor in the bedroom, then in the study, where a table set for dinner suddenly appeared; then she was not there, but Dolly was. Then Levin remembered he had been sent somewhere. Once he had been sent to move a table and sofa. He had done this eagerly, thinking it had to be done for her sake, and only later on he found it was his own bed he had been getting ready. Then he had been sent to the study to ask the doctor something. The doctor had answered and then had said something about the irregularities in the municipal coun cil.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  What delighted him was the thought how much easier it was to believe in a still existing living church, embracing all the beliefs of men, and having God at its head, and therefore holy and infallible, and from it to accept the faith in God, in the creation, the fall, the redemption, than to begin with God, a mysterious, far-away God, the creation, etc. But afterwards, on reading a Catholic writer's history of the church, and then a Greek Orthodox writer's history of the church, and seeing that the two churches, in their very conception infallible, each deny the authority of the other, Homiakov's doctrine of the church lost all its charm for him, and this edifice crumbled into dust like the philosophers' edifices. All that spring he was not himself, and went through fearful moments of horror. 'Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life's impossible; and that I can't know, and so I can't live,' Levin said to himself. 'In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble-organism, and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that bubble is Me.' It was an agonising error, but it was the sole logical result of ages of human thought in that direction. This was the ultimate belief on which all the systems elaborated by human thought in almost all their ramifications rested. It was the prevalent conviction, and of all other explanations Levin had unconsciously, not knowing when or how, chosen it, as anyway the clearest, and made it his own. But it was not merely a falsehood, it was the cruel jeer of some wicked power, some evil, hateful power, to whom one could not submit. He must escape from this power. And the means of escape every man had in his own hands. He had but to cut short this dependence on evil. And there was one means—death. And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he might not be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun for fear of shooting himself. But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living. X W HEN Levin thought what he was and what he was living for, he could find no answer to the questions and was reduced to despair, but he left off questioning himself about it.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'But never mind, don't let's talk of him. Tell me what you've been doing? What is the matter? What has been wrong with you, and what did the doctor say?' She looked at him with mocking amusement. Evidently she had hit on other absurd and grotesque aspects in her husband, and was awaiting the moment to give expression to them. But he went on— 'I imagine that it's no illness, but your condition. When will it be?' The ironical light died away in her eyes, but a different smile, a consciousness of something, he did not know what, and of quiet melancholy, came over her face. 'Soon, soon. You say that our position is miserable, that we must put an end to it. If you knew how terrible it is to me, what I would give to be able to love you freely and boldly! I should not torture myself and torture you with my jealousy. . . . And it will come soon, but not as we expect.' And at the thought of how it would come, she seemed so pitiable to herself that tears came into her eyes, and she could not go on. She laid her hand on his sleeve, dazzling and white with its rings in the lamplight. 'It won't come as we suppose. I didn't mean to say this to you, but you've made me. Soon, soon, all will be over, and we shall all, all be at peace, and suffer no more.' 'I don't understand,' he said, understanding her. 'You asked when? Soon. And I shan't live through it. Don't interrupt me!' and she made haste to speak. 'I know it; I know it for certain. I shall die; and I'm very glad I shall die, and release myself and you.' Tears dropped from her eyes; he bent down over her hand and began kissing it, trying to hide his emotion, which, he knew, had no sort of grounds, though he could not control it. 'Yes, it's better so,' she said, tightly gripping his hand. 'That's the only way, the only way left us.' He had recovered himself, and lifted his head. 'How absurd! What absurd nonsense you are talking!' 'No, it's the truth.' 'What, what's the truth?' 'That I shall die. I have had a dream.' 'A dream?' repeated Vronsky, and instantly he recalled the peasant of his dream. 'Yes, a dream,' she said. 'It's a long while since I dreamed it. I dreamed that I ran into my bedroom, that I had to get something there, to find out something; you know how it is in dreams,' she said, her eyes wide with horror; 'and in the bedroom, in the corner, stood something.' 'Oh, what nonsense! How can you believe . . . ' But she would not let him interrupt her. What she was saying was too important to her.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He was well acquainted with the way dilettanti have (the cleverer they were the worse he found them) of looking at the works of contemporary artists with the sole object of being in a position to say that art is a thing of the past, and that the more one sees of the new men the more one sees how inimitable the works of the great old masters have remained. He expected all this; he saw it all in their faces, he saw it in the careless indifference with which they talked among themselves, stared at the lay figures and busts, and walked about in leisurely fashion, waiting for him to uncover his picture. But in spite of this, while he was turning over his studies, pulling up the blinds and taking off the sheet, he was in intense excitement, especially as, in spite of his conviction that all distinguished and wealthy Russians were certain to be beasts and fools, he liked Vronsky, and still more Anna. 'Here, if you please,' he said, moving on one side with his nimble gait and pointing to his picture, 'it's the exhortation to Pilate. Matthew, chapter xxvii,' he said, feeling his lips were beginning to tremble with emotion. He moved away and stood behind them. For the few seconds during which the visitors were gazing at the picture in silence Mihailov too gazed at it with the indifferent eye of an outsider. For those few seconds he was sure in anticipation that a higher, juster criticism would be uttered by them, by those very visitors whom he had been so despising a moment before. He forgot all he had thought about his picture before during the three years he had been painting it; he forgot all its qualities which had been absolutely certain to him—he saw the picture with their indifferent, new, outside eyes, and saw nothing good in it. He saw in the foreground Pilate's irritated face and the serene face of Christ, and in the background the figures of Pilate's retinue and the face of John watching what was happening. Every face that, with such agony, such blunders and corrections had grown up within him with its special character, every face that had given him such torments and such raptures, and all these faces so many times transposed for the sake of the harmony of the whole, all the shades of colour and tones that he had attained with such labour—all of this together seemed to him now, looking at it with their eyes, the merest vulgarity, something that had been done a thousand times over. The face dearest to him, the face of Christ, the centre of the picture, which had given him such ecstasy as it unfolded itself to him, was utterly lost to him when he glanced at the picture with their eyes.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'Kitty, you're not dancing the mazurka?' 'No, no,' said Kitty in a voice shaking with tears. 'He asked her for the mazurka before me,' said Countess Nordston, knowing Kitty would understand who were 'he' and 'her'. 'She said: "Why, aren't you going to dance it with Princess Shtcherbatsky?"' 'Oh, I don't care!' answered Kitty. No one but she herself understood her position; no one knew that she had just refused the man whom perhaps she loved, and refused him because she had put her faith in another. Countess Nordston found Korsunsky, with whom she was to dance the mazurka, and told him to ask Kitty. Kitty danced in the first couple, and luckily for her she had not to talk, because Korsunsky was all the time running about directing the figure. Vronsky and Anna sat almost opposite her. She saw them with her long-sighted eyes, and saw them, too, close by, when they met in the figures, and the more she saw of them the more convinced was she that her unhappiness was complete. She saw that they felt themselves alone in that crowded room. And on Vronsky's face, always so firm and independent, she saw that look that had struck her, of bewilderment and humble submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog when it has done wrong. Anna smiled, and her smile was reflected by him. She grew thoughtful, and he became serious. Some supernatural force drew Kitty's eyes to Anna's face. She was fascinating in her simple black dress, fascinating were her round arms with their bracelets, fascinating was her firm neck with its thread of pearls, fascinating the straying curls of her loose hair, fascinating the graceful, light movements of her little feet and hands, fascinating was that lovely face in its eagerness, but there was something terrible and cruel in her fascination. Kitty admired her more than ever, and more and more acute was her suffering. Kitty felt overwhelmed, and her face showed it. When Vronsky saw her, coming across her in the mazurka, he did not at once recognise her, she was so changed. 'Delightful ball!' he said to her, for the sake of saying something. 'Yes,' she answered. In the middle of the mazurka, repeating a complicated figure, newly invented by Korsunsky, Anna came forward into the centre of the circle, chose two gentlemen, and summoned a lady and Kitty. Kitty gazed at her in dismay as she went up. Anna looked at her with drooping eyelids, and smiled, pressing her hand. But, noticing that Kitty only responded to her smile by a look of despair and amazement, she turned away from her, and began gaily talking to the other lady.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Well, suppose I make the effort; I do it. Either I receive a humiliating refusal or consent . . . Well, I have received his consent, say . . .' Anna was at that moment at the furthest end of the room, and she stopped there, doing something to the curtain at the window . . . 'I receive his consent, but my . . . my son? They won't give him up to me. He will grow up despising me, with his father, whom I've abandoned. Do you see, I love . .. equally, I think, but both more than myself—two creatures, Seryozha and Alexey.' She came out into the middle of the room and stood facing Dolly, with her arms pressed tightly across her chest. In her white dressing-gown her figure seemed more than usually grand and broad. She bent her head, and with shining, wet eyes looked from under her brows at Dolly, a thin little pitiful figure in her patched dressing-jacket and night-cap, shaking all over with emotion. 'It is only those two creatures that I love, and one excludes the other. I can't have them together, and that's the only thing I want. And since I can't have that, I don't care about the rest. I don't care about anything, anything. And it will end one way or another, and so I can't, I don't like to talk of it. So don't blame me, don't judge me for anything. You can't with your pure heart understand all that I'm suffering.' She went up, sat down beside Dolly, and with a guilty look, peeped into her face and took her hand. 'What are you thinking? What are you thinking about me? Don't despise me. I don't deserve contempt. I'm simply unhappy. If any one is unhappy, I am,' she articulated, and turning away, she burst into tears. Left alone, Darya Alexandrovna said her prayers and went to bed. She had felt for Anna with all her heart while she was speaking to her, but now she could not force herself to think of her. The memories of home and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own seemed to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go back next day. Anna meantime went back to her boudoir, took a wine-glass and dropped into it several drops of a medicine, of which the principal ingredient was morphine. After drinking it off and sitting till a while, she went into her bedroom in a soothed and more cheerful frame of mind. When she went into the bedroom, Vronsky looked intently at her.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She suddenly felt that she had got far away from Anna; that there lay between them a barrier of questions on which they could never agree, and about which it was better not to speak. XXIV 'T HEN there is all the more reason for you to legalise your position, if possible,' said Dolly. 'Yes, if possible,' said Anna, speaking all at once in an utterly different tone, subdued and mournful. 'Surely you don't mean a divorce is impossible? I was told your husband had consented to it.' 'Dolly, I don't want to talk about that.' 'Oh, we won't then,' Darya Alexandrovna hastened to say, noticing the expression of suffering on Anna's face. 'All I see is that you take too gloomy a view of things.' I? Not at all! I'm always bright and happy. You see, je fais des passions. Veslovsky . . . ' 'Yes, to tell the truth, I don't like Veslovsky's tone,' said Darya Alexandrovna, anxious to change the subject. 'Oh, that's nonsense! It amuses Alexey, and that's all; but he's a boy, and quite under my control. You know, I turn him as I please. It's just as it might be with your Grisha…. Dolly!'—she suddenly changed the subject—'you say I take too gloomy a view of things. You can't understand. It's too awful! I try not to take any view of it at all.' 'But I think you ought to. You ought to do all you can.' 'But what can I do? Nothing. You tell me to marry Alexey, and say I don't think about it. I don't think about it!' she repeated, and a flush rose into her face. She got up, straightening her chest, and sighed heavily. With her light step she began pacing up and down the room, stopping now and then. 'I don't think of it? Not a day, not an hour passes that I don't think of it, and blame myself for thinking of i t . . . because thinking of that may drive me mad. Drive me mad!' she repeated. 'When I think of it, I can't sleep without morphine. But never mind. Let us talk quietly. They tell me, divorce. In the first place, he won't give me a divorce. He's under the influence of Countess Lidia Ivanovna now.' Darya Alexandrovna, sitting erect on a chair, turned her head, following Anna with a face of sympathetic suffering. 'You ought to make the attempt,' she said softly. 'Suppose I make the attempt. What does it mean?' she said, evidently giving utterance to a thought, a thousand times thought over and learned by heart. 'It means that I, hating him, but still recognising that I have wronged him—and I consider him magnanimous—that I humiliate myself to write to him . . .

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  And what was this inevitable death—he did not know, had never thought about it, and what was more, had not the power, had not the courage to think about it. 'I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten—death.' He sat on his bed in the darkness, crouched up, hugging his knees, and holding his breath from the strain of thought, he pondered. But the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten one little fact—that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it any way. Yes, it was awful, but it was so. 'But I am alive still. Now what's to be done? what's to be done?' he said in despair. He lighted a candle, got up cautiously and went to the looking-glass, and began looking at his face and hair. Yes, there were grey hairs about his temples. He opened his mouth. His back teeth were beginning to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, there was strength in them. But Nikolay, who lay there breathing with what was left of lungs, had had a strong, healthy body too. And suddenly he recalled how they used to go to bed together as children, and how they only waited till Fyodor Bogdanitch was out of the room to fling pillows at each other and laugh, laugh irrepressibly, so that even their awe of Fyodor Bogdanitch could not check the effervescing, overbrimming sense of life and happiness. 'And now that bent, hollow chest . . . and I, not knowing what will become of me, or wherefore . . .' ' K… ha ! K … ha! Damnation! Why do you keep fidgeting, why don't you go to sleep?' his brother's voice called to him. 'Oh, I don't know; I'm not sleepy.' 'I have had a good sleep, I'm not in a sweat now. Just see, feel my shirt; it's not wet, is it?' Levin felt, withdrew behind the screen, and put out the candle, but for a long while he could not sleep. The question how to live had hardly begun to grow a little clearer to him, when a new. insoluble question presented itself—death. 'Why, he's dying—yes, he'll die in the spring, and how help him? What can I say to him? What do I know about it? I'd even forgotten that it was at all.' XXXII L EVIN had long before made the observation that when one is uncomfortable with people from their being excessively amenable and meek, one is apt very soon after to find things intolerable from their touchiness and irritability. He felt that this was how it would be with his brother. And his brother Nikolay's gentleness did in fact not last out for long.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He could now think calmly of Alexey Alexandrovitch. He recognised all his magnanimity, but he did not now feel himself humiliated by it. Besides, he got back again into the beaten track of his life. He saw the possibility of looking men in the face again without shame, and he could live in accordance with his own habits. One thing he could not pluck out of his heart, though he never ceased struggling with it, was the regret, amounting to despair, that he had lost her for ever. That now, having expiated his sin against the husband, he was bound to renounce her, and never in future to stand between her with her repentance and her husband, he had firmly decided in his heart; but he could not tear out of his heart his regret at the loss of her love, he could not erase from his memory those moments of happiness that he had so little prized at the time, and that haunted him in all their charm. Serpuhovskoy had planned his appointment at Tashkend, and Vronsky agreed to the proposition without the slightest hesitation. But the nearer the time of departure came, the bitterer was the sacrifice he was making to what he thought his duty. His wound had healed, and he was driving about making preparations for his departure for Tashkend. 'To see her once and then to bury myself, to die,' he thought, and as. he was paying farewell visits, he uttered this thought to Betsy. Charged with this commission, Betsy had gone to Anna, and brought him back a negative reply. 'So much the better,' thought Vronsky, when he received the news. 'It was a weakness, which would have shattered what strength I have left.' Next day Betsy herself came to him in the morning, and announced that she had heard through Oblonsky as. a positive fact that Alexey Alexandrovitch had agreed to a divorce, and that therefore Vronsky could see Anna. Without even troubling himself to see Betsy out of his flat, forgetting all his resolutions, without asking when he could see her, where her husband was, Vronsky drove straight to the Karenins'. He ran up the stairs seeing no one and nothing, and with a rapid step, almost breaking into a run, he went into her room. And without considering, without noticing whether there was anyone in the room or not, he flung his arms round her, and began to cover her face, her hands, her neck with kisses. Anna had been preparing herself for this meeting, had thought what she would say to him, but she did not succeed in saying anything of it; his passion mastered her. She tried to calm him, to calm herself, but it was too late. His feeling infected her.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin clutched at his head and ran out of the room. 'It's nothing, it's nothing, it's all right,' Dolly called after him. But they might say what they liked, he knew now that all was over. He stood in the next room, his head leaning against the doorpost, and heard shrieks, howls such as he had never heard before, and he knew that what had been Kitty was uttering these shrieks. He had long ago ceased to wish for the child. By now he loathed this child. He did not even wish for her life now, all he longed for was the end of this awful anguish. 'Doctor! What is it? What is it? By God!' he said, snatching at the doctor's hand as he came up. 'It's the end,' said the doctor. And the doctor's face was so grave as he said it that Levin took the end as meaning her death. Beside himself, he ran into the bedroom. The first thing he saw was the face of Lizaveta Petrovna. It was even more frowning and stern. Kitty's face he did not know. In the place where it had been was something that was fearful in its strained distortion and in the sounds that came from it. He fell down with his head on the wooden framework of the bed, feeling that his heart was bursting. The awful scream never paused, it became still more awful, and as though it had reached the utmost limit of terror, suddenly it ceased. Levin could not believe his ears, but there could be no doubt; the scream had ceased and he heard a subdued stir and bustle, and hurried breathing, and her voice, gasping, alive, tender, and blissful, uttered softly, 'It's over!' He lifted his head. With her hands hanging exhausted on the quilt, looking extraordinarily lovely and serene, she looked at him in silence and tried to smile, and could not. And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful far-away world in which he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself all in an instant borne back to the old everyday world, glorified though now, by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear it. The strained chords snapped, sobs and tears of joy which he had never foreseen rose up with such violence that his whole body shook, that for long they prevented him from speaking. Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife's hand before his lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement of the fingers, responded to his kiss. And meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in the deft hands of Lizaveta Petrovna, like a flickering light in a lamp, lay the life of a human creature, which had never existed before, and which would now with the same right, with the same importance to itself, live and create in its own image. 'Alive! alive!

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  For me there is one thing, and one thing only—your love. If that's mine, I feel so exalted, so strong, that nothing can be humiliating to me. I am proud of my position, because . . . proud of being . . . proud . . . ' She could not say what she was proud of. Tears of shame and despair choked her utterance. She stood still and sobbed. He felt, too, something swelling in his throat and twitching in his nose, and for the first time in his life he felt on the point of weeping. He could not have said exactly what it was touched him so. He felt sorry for her, and he felt he could not help her, and with that he knew that he was to blame for her wretchedness, that he had done something wrong. 'Is not a divorce possible?' he said feebly. She shook her head, not answering. 'Couldn't you take your son, and still leave him?' 'Yes; but it all depends on him. Now I must go to him,' she said shortly. Her presentiment that all would again go on in the old way had not deceived her. 'On Tuesday I shall be in Petersburg, and everything can be settled.' 'Yes,' she said. 'But don't let us talk any more of it.' Anna's carriage, which she had sent away, and ordered to come back to the little gate of the Vrede garden, drove up. Anna said good-bye to Vronsky, and drove home. XXIII O N Monday there was the usual sitting of the Commission of the 2nd of June. Alexey Alexandrovitch walked into the hall where the sitting was held, greeted the members and the president, as usual, and sat down in his place, putting his hand on the papers laid ready before him. Among these papers lay the necessary evidence and a rough outline of the speech he intended to make. But he did not really need these documents. He remembered every point, and did not think it necessary to go over in his memory what he would say. He knew that when the time came, and when he saw his enemy facing him, and studiously endeavouring to assume an expression of indifference, his speech would flow of itself better than he could prepare it now. He felt that the import of his speech was of such magnitude that every word of it would have weight. Meantime, as he listened to the usual report, he had the most innocent and inoffensive air.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She was weeping that her dream of her position being made clear and definite had been annihilated for ever. She knew beforehand that everything would go on in the old way, and far worse indeed than in the old way. She felt that the position in the world that she enjoyed, and that had seemed to her of so little consequence in the morning, that this position was precious to her, that she would not have the strength to exchange it for the shameful position of a woman who has abandoned husband and child to join her lover; that however much she might struggle, she could not be stronger than herself. She would never know freedom in love, but would remain for ever a guilty wife, with the menace of detection hanging over her at every instant; deceiving her husband for the sake of a shameful connection with a man living apart and away from her, whose life she could never share. She knew that this was how it would be, and at the same time it was so awful that she could not even conceive what it would end in. And she cried without restraint, as children cry when they are punished. The sound of the footman's steps forced her to rouse herself, and, hiding her face from him, she pretended to be writing. 'The courier asks if there's an answer,' the footman announced. 'An answer? Yes,' said Anna. 'Let him wait. I'll ring.' 'What can I write?' she thought. 'What can I decide upon alone? What do I know? What do I want? What is there I care for?' Again she felt that her soul was beginning to be split in two. She was terrified again at this feeling, and clutched at the. first pretext for doing something which might divert her thoughts from herself. 'I ought to see Alexey' (so she called Vronsky in her thoughts); 'no one but he can tell me what I ought to do. I'll go to Betsy's, perhaps I shall see him there,' she said to herself, completely forgetting that when she had told him the day before that she was not going to Princess Tverskoy's, he had said that in that case he should not go either. She went up to the table, wrote to her husband, 'I have received your letter.—A.'; and, ringing the bell, gave it to the footman. 'We are not going,' she said to Annushka, as she came in. 'Not going at all?' 'No; don't unpack till tomorrow, and let the carriage wait. I'm going to the princess's.' 'Which dress am I to get ready?' XVII T HE croquet party to which the Princess Tverskoy had invited Anna was to consist of two ladies and their adorers.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'But what of him?' Kitty looked at him and was filled with horror. What was pictured so clearly to Kitty in the mirror of Anna's face she saw in him. What had become of his always self-possessed resolute manner, and the carelessly serene expression of his face? Now every time he turned to her, he bent his head, as though he would have fallen at her feet, and in his eyes there was nothing but humble submission and dread. 'I would not offend you,' his eyes seemed every time to be saying, 'but I want to save myself, and I don't know how.' On his face was a look such as Kitty had never seen before. They were speaking of common acquaintances, keeping up the most trivial conversation, but to Kitty it seemed that every word they said was determining their fate and hers. And strange it was that they were actually talking of how absurd Ivan Ivanovitch was with his French, and how the Eletsky girl might have made a better match, yet these words had all the while consequence for them, and they were feeling just as Kitty did. The whole ball, the whole world, everything seemed lost in fog in Kitty's soul. Nothing but the stern discipline of her bringing-up supported her and forced her to do what was expected of her, that is, to dance, to answer questions, to talk, even to smile. But before the mazurka, when they were beginning to rearrange the chairs and a few couples moved out of the smaller rooms into the big room, a moment of despair and horror came for Kitty. She had refused five partners, and now she was not dancing the mazurka. She had not even a hope of being asked for it, because she was so successful in society that the idea would never occur to anyone that she had remained disengaged till now. She would have to tell her mother she felt ill and go home, but she had not the strength to do this. She felt crushed. She went to the furthest end of the little drawing-room and sank into a low chair. Her light, transparent skirts rose like a cloud about her slender waist; one bare, thin, soft, girlish arm, hanging listlessly, was lost in the folds of her pink tunic; in the other she held her fan, and with rapid, short strokes fanned her burning face. But while she looked like a butterfly, clinging to a blade of grass, and just about to open its rainbow wings for fresh flight, her heart ached with a horrible despair. 'But perhaps I am wrong, perhaps it was not so?' And again she recalled all she had seen. 'Kitty, what is it?' said Countess Nordston, stepping noiselessly over the carpet towards her. 'I don't understand it.' Kitty's lower lip began to quiver; she got up quickly.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  In spite of death, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life. The doctor confirmed his suppositions in regard to Kitty. Her indisposition was a symptom that she was with child. XXI F ROM the moment when Alexey Alexandrovitch understood from his interviews with Betsy and with Stepan Arkadyevitch that all that was expected of him was to leave his wife in peace, without burdening her with his presence, and that his wife herself desired this, he felt so distraught that he could come to no decision of himself; he did not know himself what he wanted now, and putting himself in the hands of those who were so pleased to interest themselves in his affairs, he met everything with unqualified assent. It was only when Anna had left his house, and the English governess sent to ask him whether she should dine with him or separately, that for the first time he clearly comprehended his position, and was appalled by it. Most difficult of all in this position was the fact that he could not in any way connect and reconcile his past with what was now. It was not the past when he had lived happily with his wife that troubled him. The transition from that past to a knowledge of his wife's unfaithfulness he had lived through miserably already; that state was painful, but he could understand it. If his wife had then, on declaring to him her unfaithfulness, left him, he would have been wounded, unhappy, but he would not have been in the hopeless position—incomprehensible to himself—in which he felt himself now. He could not now reconcile his immediate past, his tenderness, his love for his sick wife, and for the other man's child with what was now the case, that is with the fact that, as it were, in return for all this he now found himself alone, put to shame, a laughing-stock, needed by no one, and despised by everyone.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He threw open his coat, but afterwards did take it off, and sat on for a whole hour, talking to Levin about hunting and the most intimate subjects. 'Come, tell me, please, what you did abroad? Where have you been?' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, when the peasant had gone. 'Oh, I stayed in Germany, in Prussia, in France, and in England— not in the capitals, but in the manufacturing towns, and saw a great deal that was new to me. And I'm glad I went.' 'Yes, I knew your idea of the solution of the labour question.' 'Not a bit: in Russia there can be no labour question. In Russia the question is that of the relation of the working people to the land; though the question exists there too—but there it's a matter of repairing what's been ruined, while with us . . . ' Stepan Arkadyevitch listened attentively to Levin. 'Yes, yes!' he said, 'it's very possible you're right. But I'm glad you're in good spirits, and are hunting bears, and working, and interested. Shtcherbatsky told me another story—he met you—that you were in such a depressed state, talking of nothing but death. . . .' 'Well, what of it? I've not given up thinking of death,' said Levin. 'It's true that it's high time I was dead; and that all this is nonsense. It's the truth I'm telling you. I do value my idea and my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great—ideas, work—it's all dust and ashes.' 'But all that's as old as the hills, my boy!' 'It is old; but do you know, when you grasp this fully, then somehow everything becomes of no consequence. When you understand that you will die tomorrow, if not today, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant! And I consider my idea very important, but it turns out really to be as unimportant too, even if it were carried out, as doing for that bear. So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work—anything so as not to think of death!' Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled a subtle and affectionate smile as he listened to Levin. 'Well, of course! Here you've come round to my point. Do you remember you attacked me for seeking enjoyment in life? Don't be so severe, O moralist!' 'No; all the same, what's fine in life is . . .' Levin hesitated—'oh, I don't know. All I know is that we shall soon be dead.' 'Why so soon?' 'And do you know, there's less charm in life, when one thinks of death, but there's more peace.' 'On the contrary, the finish is always the best. But I must be going,' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting up for the tenth time. 'Oh no, stay a bit!' said Levin, keeping him.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  As Professor Bain says: "The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary, above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of mental progress." The need of securing success at the outset is imperative. Failure at first is apt to dampen the energy of all future attempts, whereas past experience of success nerves one to future vigor. Goethe says to a man who consulted him about an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers: "Ach! you need only blow on your hands!" And the remark illustrates the effect on Goethe's spirits of his own habitually successful career. Prof. Baumann, from whom I borrow the anecdote,[151] says that the collapse of barbarian nations when Europeans come among them is due to their despair of ever succeeding as the new-comers do in the larger tasks of life. Old ways are broken and new ones not formed. The question of 'tapering-off,' in abandoning such habits as drink and opium-indulgence, comes in here, and is a question about which experts differ within certain limits, and in regard to what may be best for an individual case. In the main, however, all expert opinion would agree that abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best way, if there be a real possibility of carrying it out . We must be careful not to give the will so stiff a task as to insure its defeat at the very outset; but, provided one can stand it , a sharp period of suffering, and then a free time, is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit like that of opium, or in simply changing one's hours of rising or of work. It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be never fed.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "Contemptible in my own eyes, I fell into such a state of melancholy as would, if long continued, inevitably have led to insanity or death. I continued to wear my disgraceful fetters till towards the end of January, 1775, when my rage, which had hitherto so often been restrained within bounds, broke forth with the greatest violence. On returning one evening from the opera (the most insipid and tiresome amusement in Italy), where I had passed several hours in the box of the woman who was by turns the object of my antipathy and my love, I took the firm determination of emancipating myself forever from her yoke. Experience had taught me that flight, so far from enabling me to persevere in my resolutions, tended on the contrary to weaken and destroy them; I was inclined therefore to subject myself to a still more severe trial, imagining from the obstinacy and peculiarity of my character that I should succeed most certainly by the adoption of such measures as would compel me to make the greatest efforts. I determined never to leave the house, which, as I have already said, was exactly opposite that of the lady; to gaze at her windows, to see her go in and out every day, to listen to the sound of her voice, though firmly resolved that no advances on her part, either direct or indirect, no tender remembrances, nor in short any other means which might be employed, should ever again tempt me to a revival of our friendship. I was determined to die or liberate myself from my disgraceful thraldom. In order to give stability to my purpose, and to render it impossible for me to waver without the imputation of dishonor, I communicated my determination to one of my friends, who was greatly attached to me, and whom I highly esteemed. He had lamented the state of mind into which I had fallen, but not wishing to give countenance to my conduct, and seeing the impossibility of inducing me to abandon it, he had for some time ceased to visit at my house. In the few lines which I addressed to him, I briefly stated the resolution I had adopted, and as a pledge of my constancy I sent him a long tress of my ugly red hair. I had purposely caused it to be cut off in order to prevent my going out, as no one but clowns and sailors then appeared in public with short hair. I concluded my billet by conjuring him to strengthen and aid my fortitude by his presence and example. Isolated in this manner in my own house, I prohibited all species of intercourse, and passed the first fifteen days in uttering the most frightful lamentations and groans. Some of my friends came to visit me, and appeared to commiserate my situation, perhaps because I did not myself complain; but my figure and whole appearance bespoke my sufferings. Wishing to read something I had recourse to the gazettes, whole pages of which I frequently ran over without understanding a single word. . . I passed more than two months till the end of March 1775, in a state bordering on frenzy; but about this time a new idea darted into my mind, which tended to assuage my melancholy."

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  [510] Cf. Aristotle's Nichomachæan Ethics, VII. 3; also a discussion of the doctrine of 'The Practical Syllogism' in Sir A. Grant's edition of this work, 2d ed. vol. I. p. 212 ff.[511] The Duality of the Mind, pp. 141-2. Another case from the same book (p 123): "A gentleman of respectable birth, excellent education, and ample fortune, engaged in one of the highest departments of trade, . . . and being induced to embark in one of the plausible speculations of the day . . . was utterly ruined. Like other men he could bear a sudden overwhelming reverse better than a long succession of petty misfortunes, and the way in which he conducted himself on the occasion met with unbounded admiration from his friends. He withdrew, however, into rigid seclusion, and being no longer able to exercise the generosity and indulge the benevolent feelings which had formed the happiness of his life, made himself a substitute for them by daydreams, gradually fell into a state of irritable despondency, from which he only gradually recovered with the loss of reason. He now fancied himself possessed of immense wealth, and gave without stint his imaginary riches. He has ever since been under gentle restraint, and leads a life not merely of happiness, but of bliss; converses rationally, reads the newspapers, where every tale of distress attracts his notice, and being furnished with an abundant supply of blank checks, he fills up one of them with a munificent sum, sends it off to the sufferer, and sits down to his dinner with a happy conviction that he has earned the right to a little indulgence in the pleasures of the table; and yet, on a serious conversation with one of his old friends, he is quite conscious of his real position, but the conviction is so exquisitely painful that he will not let himself believe it."[512] 'Le Sentiment de l'Effort, et la Conscience de l'Action,' in Revue Philosophique, XXVIII. 561.[513] P. 577.[514] They will be found indicated, in somewhat popular form, in a lecture on 'The Dilemma of Determinism,' published in the Unitarian Review (of Boston) for September 1884 (vol. XXII. p. 193).[515] See Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, pp. 594-5; and compare the conclusion of our own chapter on Attention, Vol. I. pp. 448-454.[516] Thus at least I interpret Prof. Lipps' words: "Wir wissen us naturgemass in jedem Streben umsomehr aktiv, je mehr unser ganzes Ich bei dem Streben betheiligt ist," u. s. w. (p. 601).[517] Such ejaculations as Mr. Spencer's: "Psychical changes either conform to law or they do not. If they do not, this work, in common with all works on the subject, is sheer nonsense: no science of Psychology is possible" (Principles of Psychology, I. 503), —are beneath criticism. Mr. Spencer's work, like all the other 'works on the subject,' treats of those general conditions of possible conduct within which all our real decisions must fall no matter whether their effort be small or great.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The world of living realities as contrasted with unrealities is thus anchored in the Ego, considered as an active and emotional term.[317] That is the hook from which the rest dangles, the absolute support. And as from a painted hook it has been said that one can only hang a painted chain, so conversely, from a real hook only a real chain can properly be hung. Whatever things have intimate and continuous connection with my life are things of whose reality I cannot doubt. Whatever things fail to establish this connection are things which are practically no better for me than if they existed not at all. In certain forms of melancholic perversion of the sensibilities and reactive powers, nothing touches us intimately, rouses us, or wakens natural feeling. The consequence is the complaint so often heard from melancholic patients, that nothing is believed in by them as it used to be, and that all sense of reality is fled from life. They are sheathed in india-rubber; nothing penetrates to the quick or draws blood, as it were. According to Griesinger, "I see, I hear!" such patients say, 'but the objects do not reach me, it is as if there were a wall between me and the outer world!" "In such patients there often is an alteration of the cutaneous sensibility, such that things feel indistinct or sometimes rough and woolly. But even were this change always present, it would not completely explain the psychic phenomenon...which reminds us more of the alteration in our psychic relations to the outer world which advancing age on the one hand, and on the other emotions and passions, may bring about in childhood we feel ourselves to be closer to the world of sensible phenomena, we lire immediately with them and in them; an intimately vital tie binds us and them together. But with the ripening of reflection this tie is loosened, the warmth of our interest cools, things look differently to us, and we act more as foreigners to the outer world, even though we know it a great deal better. Joy and expansive emotions in general draw it nearer to us again. Everything makes a more lively impression, and with the quick immediate return of this warm receptivity for sense-impressions, joy makes us feel young again. In depressing emotions it is the other way. Outer things, whether living or inorganic, suddenly grow cold and foreign to us, and even our favorite objects of interest feel as if they belonged to us no more. Under these circumstances, receiving no longer from anything a lively impression, we cease to turn towards outer things, and the sense of inward loneliness grows upon us. ... Where there is no strong intelligence to control this blasé condition, this psychic coldness and lack of interest, the issue of these states in which all seems so cold and hollow, the heart dried up, the world grown dead and empty, is often suicide or the deeper forms of insanity.[318]