Grief

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

  "But this weakness of the entire voluntary motor apparatus (the so-called apparatus of 'animal' life) is only one side of the physiology of grief. Another side, hardly less important, and in its consequences perhaps even more so, belongs to another subdivision of the motor apparatus, namely, the involuntary or 'organic' muscles, especially those which are found in the walls of the blood-vessels, and the use of which is, by contracting, to diminish the latter's calibre. These muscles and their nerves, forming together the 'vaso-motor apparatus,' act in grief contrarily to the voluntary motor apparatus. Instead of being paralyzed, like the latter, the vascular muscles are more strongly contracted than usual, so that the tissues and organs of the body become anæmic. The immediate consequence of this bloodlessness is pallor and shrunkenness, and the pale color and collapsed features are the peculiarities which, in connection with the relaxation of the visage, give to the victim of grief his characteristic physiognomy, and often give an impression of emaciation which ensues too rapidly to be possibly due to real disturbance of nutrition, or waste uncompensated by repair. Another regular consequence of the bloodlessness of the skin is a feeling of cold, and shivering. A constant symptom of grief is sensitiveness to cold, and difficulty in keeping warm. In grief, the inner organs are unquestionably anæmic as well as the skin. This is of course not obvious to the eye, but many phenomena prove it. Such is the diminution of the various secretions, at least of such as are accessible to observation. The mouth grows dry, the tongue sticky, and a bitter taste ensues which, it would appear, is only a consequence of the tongue's dryness. [The expression 'bitter sorrow' may possibly arise from this.] In nursing women the milk diminishes or altogether dries up. There is one of the most regular manifestations of grief, which apparently contradicts these other physiological phenomena, and that is the weeping, with its profuse secretion of tears, its swollen reddened face, red eyes, and augmented secretion from the nasal mucous membrane."

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

  Emotional reactions are often excited by objects with which we have no practical dealings. A ludicrous object, for example, or a beautiful object are not necessarily objects to which we do anything; we simply laugh, or stand in admiration, as the case may be. The class of emotional, is thus rather larger than that of instinctive, impulses, commonly so called. Its stimuli are more numerous, and its expressions are more internal and delicate, and often less practical. The physiological plan and essence of the two classes of impulse, however, is the same. As with instincts, so with emotions, the mere memory or imagination of the object may suffice to liberate the excitement. One may get angrier in thinking over one's insult than at the moment of receiving it; and we melt more over a mother who is dead than we ever did when she was living. In the rest of the chapter I shall use the word object of emotion indifferently to mean one which is physically present or one which is merely thought of. It would be tedious to go through a complete list of the reactions which characterize the various emotions. For that the special treatises must be referred to. A few examples of their variety, however, ought to find a place here. Let me begin with the manifestations of Grief as a Danish physiologist, C. Lange, describes them:[413]

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

  The revivability in memory of the emotions, like that of all the feelings of the lower senses, is very small. We can remember that we underwent grief or rapture, but not just how the grief or rapture felt. This difficult ideal revivability is, however, more than compensated in the case of the emotions by a very easy actual revivability. That is, we can produce, not remembrances of the old grief or rapture, but new griefs and raptures, by summoning up a lively thought of their exciting cause. The cause is now only an idea, but this idea produces the same organic irradiations, or almost the same, which were produced by its original, so that the emotion is again a reality. We have 'recaptured' it. Shame, love, and anger are particularly liable to be thus revived by ideas of their object. Professor Bain admits[434] that "in their strict character of emotion proper, they [the emotions] have the minimum of revivability; but being always incorporated with the sensations of the higher senses, they share in the superior revivability of sights and sounds." But he fails to point out that the revived sights and sounds may be ideal without ceasing to be distinct; whilst the emotion, to be distinct, must become real again. Prof. Bain seems to forget that an 'ideal emotion' and a real emotion prompted by an ideal object are two very different things.

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

  matter of popular knowledge that an impression is remembered the better in proportion as it is 1) More recent; 2) More attended to; and 3) More often repeated. The effect of recency is all but absolutely constant. Of two events of equal significance the remoter one will be the one more likely to be forgotten. The memories of childhood which persist in old age can hardly be compared with the events of the day or hour which are forgotten, for these latter are trivial once-repeated things, whilst the childish reminiscences have been wrought into us during the retrospective hours of our entire intervening life. Other things equal , at all times of life recency promotes memory. The only exception I can think of is the unaccountable memory of certain moments of our childhood, apparently not fitted by their intrinsic interest to survive, but which are perhaps the only incidents we can remember out of the year in which they occurred. Everybody probably has isolated glimpses of certain hours of his nursery life, the position in which he stood or sat, the light of the room, what his father or mother said, etc. These moments so oddly selected for immunity from the tooth of time probably owe their good fortune to historical peculiarities which it is now impossible to trace. Very likely we were reminded of them again soon after they occurred; that became a reason why we should again recollect them, etc., so that at last they became ingrained. The attention which we lend to an experience is proportional to its vivid or interesting character; and it is a notorious fact that what interests us most vividly at the time is, other things equal, what we remember best. An impression may be so exciting emotionally as almost to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues; and thus originates a pathological delusion. "A woman attacked by robbers takes all the men whom she sees, even her own son, for brigands bent on killing her. Another woman sees her child run over by a horse; no amount of reasoning, not even the sight of the living child, will persuade her that he is not killed. A woman called 'thief' in a dispute remains convinced that every one accuses her of stealing (Esquirol). Another, attacked with mania at the sight of the fires in her street during the Commune, still after six months sees in her delirium flames on every side about her (Luys), etc., etc."[586] On the general effectiveness of both attention and repetition I cannot do better than copy what M. Taine has written: "If we compare different sensations, images, or ideas, we find that their aptitudes for revival are not equal. A large number of them are obliterated, and never reappear through life; for instance, I drove through Paris a day or two ago, and though I saw plainly some sixty or eighty new faces, I cannot now recall any one of them; some extraordinary circumstance, a fit of delirium,

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

  'real' connection than this obvious and verifiable likeness and continuity, Hume seeks 'the world behind the looking-glass,' and gives a striking example of that Absolutism which is the great disease of philosophic Thought. The chain of distinct existences into which Hume thus chopped up our 'stream' was adopted by all of his successors as a complete inventory of the facts. The associationist Philosophy was founded. Somehow, out of 'ideas,' each separate, each ignorant of its mates, but sticking together and calling each other up according to certain laws, all the higher forms of consciousness were to be explained, and among them the consciousness of our personal identity. The task was a hard one, in which what we called the psychologist's fallacy (p. 134 ff.) bore the brunt of the work. Two ideas, one of 'A,' succeeded by another of 'B,' were transmuted into a third idea of 'A after B .' An idea from last year returning now was taken to be an idea of last year ; two similar ideas stood for an idea of similarity , and the like; palpable confusions, in which certain facts about the ideas, possible only to an outside knower of them, were put into the place of the ideas' own proper and limited deliverance and content. Out of such recurrences and resemblances in a series of discrete ideas and feelings a knowledge was somehow supposed to be engendered in each feeling that it was recurrent and resembling, and that it helped to form a series to whose unity the name I came to be joined. In the same way, substantially, Herbart,[277] in Germany, tried to show how a conflict of ideas would fuse into a manner of representing itself for which I was the consecrated name.[278] The defect of all these attempts is that the conclusion pretended to follow from certain premises is by no means rationally involved in the premises. A feeling of any kind, if it simply returns , ought to be nothing else than what it was at first. If memory of previous existence and all sorts of other cognitive functions are attributed to it when it returns, it is no longer the same, but a wholly different feeling, and ought to be so described. We have so described it with the greatest explicitness. We have said that feelings never do return. We have not pretended to explain this; we have recorded it as an empirically ascertained law, analogous to certain laws of brain-physiology; and, seeking to define the way in which new feelings do differ from the old, we have found them to be cognizant and appropriative of the old, whereas the old were always cognizant and appropriative of something else. Once more, this account pretended to be nothing more than a complete description of the facts. It explained them no more than the associationist account explains them. But the latter both assumes to explain them and in the same breath falsifies them, and for each reason stands condemned.

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

  we explain these differences? PRIMARY MEMORY. The first point to be noticed is that for a state of mind to survive in memory it must have endured for a certain length of time . In other words, it must be what I call a substantive state. Prepositional and conjunctival states of mind are not remembered as independent facts—we cannot recall just how we felt when we said 'how' or 'notwithstanding.' Our consciousness of these transitive states is shut up to their own moment—hence one difficulty in introspective psychologizing. Any state of mind which is shut up to its own moment and fails to become an object for succeeding states of mind, is as if it belonged to another stream of thought. Or rather, it belongs only physically, not intellectually, to its own stream, forming a bridge from one segment of it to another, but not being appropriated inwardly by later segments or appearing as part of the empirical self, in the manner explained in Chapter X. All the intellectual value for us of a state of mind depends on our after-memory of it. Only then is it combined in a system and knowingly made to contribute to a result. Only then does it count for us. So that the effective consciousness we have of our states is the after-consciousness ; and the more of this there is, the more influence does the original state have, and the more permanent a factor is it of our world. An indelibly-imprinted pain may color a life; but, as Professor Richet says: "To suffer for only a hundredth of a second is not to suffer at all; and for my part I would readily agree to undergo a pain, however acute and intense it might be, provided it should last only a hundredth of a second, and leave after it neither reverberation nor recall."[560] Not that a momentary state of consciousness need be practically resultless. Far from it: such a state, though absolutely unremembered, might at its own moment determine the transition of our thinking in a vital way, and decide our action irrevocably.[561] But the idea of it could not afterwards determine transition and action, its content could not be conceived as one of the mind's permanent meanings: that is all I mean by saying that its intellectual value lies in after-memory. As a rule sensations outlast for some little time the objective stimulus which occasioned them. This phenomenon is the ground of those 'after-images' which are familiar in the physiology of the sense-organs. If we open our eyes instantaneously upon a scene, and then shroud them in complete darkness, it will be as if we saw the scene in ghostly light through the dark screen. We can read off details in it which were unnoticed whilst the eyes were open.[562] In every sphere of sense, an intermittent stimulus, often enough repeated, produces a continuous sensation. This is because the after-image of the impression just gone by blends with the new impression coming

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

  Lange goes on to suggest that this may be a reaction from a previously contracted vaso-motor state. The explanation seems a forced one. The fact is that there are changeable expressions of grief. The weeping is as apt as not to be immediate, especially in women and children. Some men can never weep. The tearful and the dry phases alternate in all who can weep, sobbing storms being followed by periods of calm; and the shrunken, cold, and pale condition which Lange describes so well is more characteristic of a severe settled sorrow than of an acute mental pain. Properly we have two distinct emotions here, both prompted by the same object, it is true, but affecting different persons, or the same person at different times, and feeling quite differently whilst they last, as anyone's consciousness will testify. There is an excitement during the crying fit which is not without a certain pungent pleasure of its own; but it would take a genius for felicity to discover any dash of redeeming quality in the feeling of dry and shrunken sorrow.—Our author continues: "If the smaller vessels of the lungs contract so that these organs become anæmic, we have (as is usual under such conditions) the feeling of insufficient breath, and of oppression of the chest, and these tormenting sensations increase the sufferings of the griever, who seeks relief by long drawn sighs, instinctively, like every one who lacks breath from whatever cause.[414] "The anæmia of the brain in grief is shown by intellectual inertia, dullness, a feeling of mental weariness, effort, and indisposition to work, often by sleeplessness. Indeed it is the anæmia of the motor centres of the brain which lies at the bottom of all that weakening of the voluntary powers of motion which we described in the first instance." My impression is that Dr. Lange simplifies and universalizes the phenomena a little too much in this description, and in particular that he very likely overdoes the anæmia-business. But such as it is, his account may stand as a favorable specimen of the sort of descriptive work to which the emotions have given rise. Take next another emotion, Fear, and read what Mr. Darwin says of its effects:

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

  cherished fellow-being? Well, in these great griefs the present endures neither for a minute, for an hour, nor for a day, but for weeks and months. The memory of the cruel moment will not efface itself from consciousness. It disappears not, but remains living, present, coexisting with the multitude of other sensations which are juxtaposed in consciousness alongside of this one persistent emotion which is felt always in the present tense. A long time is needed ere we can attain to forgetting it, ere we can make it enter into the past. Hæret lateri letalis arundo ." (Ibid 583.) [562] This is the primary positive after-image. According to Helmholtz, one third of a second is the most favorable length of exposure to the light for producing it. Longer exposure, complicated by subsequent admission of light to the eye, results in the ordinary negative and complementary after-images, with their changes, which may (if the original impression was brilliant and the fixation long) last for many minutes. Fechner gives the name of memory-after-images (Psychophysik, II 492) to the instantaneous positive effects, and distinguishes them from ordinary after images by the following characters: 1) Their originals must have been attended to only such parts of a compound original as have been attended to appearing. This is not the case in common visual after-images. 2) The strain of attention towards them is inward, as in ordinary remembering, not outward, as in observing a common after-image. 3) A short fixation of the original is better for the memory-after-image, a long one for the ordinary after-image. 4) The colors of the memory-after-image are never complementary of those of the original. [563] Hermann's Hdbch., II. 2. 282. [564] Rev. Philos., 562. [565] Richet says: "The present has a certain duration, a variable duration, sometimes a rather long one, which comprehends all the time occupied by the after-reverberation [retentissement , after-image] of a sensation. For example, if the reverberation of an electric shock within our nerves lasts ten minutes, for that electric shock there is a present of ten minutes. On the other hand, a feebler sensation will have a shorter present. But in every case, for a conscious sensation [I should say for a remembered sensation] to occur, there must be a present of a certain duration, of a few seconds at least." We have seen in the last chapter that it is hard to trace the backward limits of this immediately intuited duration, or specious present. The figures which M. Richet supposes appear to be considerably too large. [566] Cf. Fechner, Psychophysik, II. 499. [567] The primary after-image itself cannot be utilized if the stimulus is too brief. Mr. Cattell found (Psychologische Studien, III. p. 93 ff.) that the color of a light must fall upon the eye for a period varying from 0.00275 to 0.006 of a second, in order to be recognized for what it is. Letters of the alphabet and familiar words require from 0.00075 to 0.00175 sec.—truly an interval extremely short. Some

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Psychologists point to two crucial factors that often separate those who are able to recover faster: mastery and social support. Not to be confused with optimism or learning to “grin and bear it,” mastery refers to the ability of individuals to see themselves as having a degree of control and influence over their lives—no matter what comes their way. The concept is so important to the U.S. Army that it offers soldiers and their families a ten-day course on resilience training, with intensive sessions designed to help those who might go into stressful situations such as combat, or those who send a loved one off to war. Participants learn to counter negative self-talk with more proactive and rational thinking patterns, be grateful for the good things that occur each day, and better concentrate on current tasks to stay in the present. Through exercises, soldiers also learn how to avoid unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as psychologically minimizing events that happen to them. Second, respondents who report supportive social ties are more likely to recover from trauma faster and more successfully. When friends, family, or colleagues are unreceptive and critical of a person’s attempt to share feelings about trauma, it increases the risk of PTSD. “Researchers believe the negative impact likely arises from attempts to discourage open communication, which increases cognitive avoidance and suppression of trauma-related memories, social withdrawal, and self-blame,” says Dr. Denise Cummings, a research psychologist at the University of Illinois. It’s good for us all to remember that we cannot point to someone’s life experience to explain a lack of resilience or their anxiety. Anxiety can affect anyone at any point in their life. Many people who experience anxiety didn’t have particularly challenging childhoods. And for the many who do experience it, most won’t feel it all the time or at the same intensity throughout their lives. Yet as renowned University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman’s research showed, despite whatever difficulties we may have faced in the past, every one of us can develop more resilience, learn how to better bounce back from setbacks, and stay the course through tough times. There can be enormous benefits when leaders help those who work for them overcome hurdles and setbacks. A high school principal once said to Adrian, “It may seem ironic, but the kids I worry about the most in life never get into trouble in school; they never get sent to my office. They grow into adults who’ve never had to pick up the pieces and realize that life goes on after you mess up, and that it’s okay.” Of course, helping grown-ups do this can be a challenge. Some workers become prone to coping mechanisms when things go bad—such as defensiveness and aversion to advice; withdrawal from participation; and, in extreme cases, ghosting. In fact, it’s a good rule of thumb to assume that an anxious employee may jump there very quickly.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  True enough, but some of this numbing could be due to ebbing testosterone levels. Recall the man who had no testosterone for a while. He felt he’d lost “everything I identify as being me.” His ambition, passion for life, sense of humor … all gone. Until testosterone brought it all back. Without the testosterone, he said, “you have no desire.” Phil thought he was in love. Of course he did. As suggested above, one of the few things that reliably revives a male’s sagging testosterone levels is a novel lover. 32 So he felt all the things we associate with love: renewed vitality, a new depth and intensification—a giddy thrill at being alive. How easily we mistake this potent mix of feelings for “love.” But a hormonal response to novelty isn’t love. How many men have mistaken this hormone high for a life-altering spiritual union? How many women have been blindsided by a good man’s seemingly inexplicable betrayal? How many families have been ripped apart because middle-aged men misinterpreted the surge of vitality and energy resulting from a novel sexual partner as love for a soul mate—or convinced themselves they were in love to justify what felt like a life-affirming necessity? And how many of these men then found themselves isolated, shamed, and devastated when the curse of Coolidge returned after a few months or years to reveal that the now-familiar partner was not, in fact, the true source of those feelings after all? No one knows the number, but it’s a big one. This common situation is heavy with tragedy, but one of the most painful aspects may be that many of these men will realize that the woman they left behind was a far better match than the one they left her for. Once the transitory thrill passes, these men are left once again with the realities of what makes a relationship work over the long run: respect, admiration, convergent interests, good conversation, sense of humor, and so on. A marriage built upon sexual passion alone has as much chance of enduring as a house built on winter ice. Only by arriving at a more nuanced understanding of the nature of human sexuality will we learn to make smarter decisions about our long-term commitments. But this understanding requires us to face some uncomfortable facts. Like many men in the same situation, Phil said he felt as if he faced a “life or death” decision. Maybe he did.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  2 How would it feel to live in such a world? Well, we all know how it feels to live in this one. Apart from death itself, what causes as much human misery as the ongoing demise of marriage? In 2008, almost 40 percent of the mothers who gave birth in the United States were unmarried. This matters. As Caitlin Flanagan reported recently in Time, “On every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households. Longevity, drug abuse, school performance and dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior and incarceration … in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others.” 3 “Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing,” observed German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. “A confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.” Indeed. By insisting upon an ideal vision of marriage founded upon a lifetime of sexual fidelity to one person—a vision most of us eventually learn is highly unrealistic, we invite punishment upon ourselves, upon each other, and upon our children. “The French are much more comfortable with the idea that their affair partner is just that—an affair partner,” writes Pamela Druckerman in her cross-cultural look at infidelity, Lust in Translation. Understanding that love and sex are different things, Druckerman says the French feel less need to “complain about their marriage to legitimize the affair in the first place.” But she found that Americans and British couples seemed to be reading from an entirely different script. “An affair, even a one-night stand, means a marriage is over,” Druckerman observed. “I spoke to women who, on discovering that their husbands had cheated, immediately packed a bag and left, because ‘that’s what you do.’ Not because that’s what they wanted to do—they just thought that was the rule. They didn’t even seem to realize there were other options…. I mean, really, like they’re reading from a script! “ 4 Psychologist Julian Jaynes described the commingling of terror and exhilaration one experiences upon realizing that things are not as they’d seemed: “There is an awkward moment at the top of a Ferris wheel when, having come up the inside curvature, where we are facing into a firm structure of confident girders, suddenly that structure disappears, and we are thrust out into the sky for the outward curve down.” 5 This is the moment too many couples struggle in vain to avoid or ignore—even to the point of choosing bitter divorce and fractured family over the daunting task of confronting the sky together, with all the “confident girders” behind them in the past.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'Yes, might have been,' he said mournfully. 'He's just one of those people of whom they say they're not for this world.' 'But we have many days before us; we must go to bed,' said Kitty, glancing at her tiny watch. XX T HE next day the sick man received the sacrament and extreme unction. During the ceremony Nikolay Levin prayed fervently. His great eyes, fastened on the holy image that was set out on a card-table covered with a coloured napkin, expressed such passionate prayer and hope that it was awful to Levin to see it. Levin knew that this passionate prayer and hope would only make him feel more bitterly parting from the life he so loved. Levin knew his brother and the workings of his intellect: he knew that his unbelief came not from life being easier for him without faith, but had grown up because step by step the contemporary scientific interpretation of natural phenomena crushed out the possibility of faith; and so he knew that his present return was not a legitimate one, brought about by way of the same working of his intellect, but simply a temporary, interested return to faith in a desperate hope of recovery. Levin knew too that Kitty had strengthened this hope by accounts of the marvellous recoveries she had heard of. Levin knew all this; and it was agonisingly painful to him to behold the supplicating, hopeful eyes and the emaciated wrist, lifted with difficulty, making the sign of the cross on the tense brow, and the prominent shoulders and hollow, gasping chest, which one could not feel consistent with the life the sick man was praying for. During the sacrament Levin did what he, an unbeliever, had done a thousand times. He said, addressing God, 'If Thou dost exist, make this man to recover' (of course this same thing has been repeated many times), 'and Thou wilt save him and me.' After extreme unction the sick man became suddenly much better. He did not cough once in the course of an hour, smiled, kissed Kitty's hand, thanking her with tears, and said he was comfortable, free from pain, and that he felt strong and had an appetite. He even raised himself when his soup was brought, and asked for a cutlet as well. Hopelessly ill as he was, obvious as it was at the first glance that he could not recover, Levin and Kitty were for that hour both in the same state of excitement, happy, though fearful of being mistaken. 'Is he better?' 'Yes, much.' 'It's wonderful.' 'There's nothing wonderful in it.' 'Anyway he's better,' they said in a whisper, smiling to one another. This self-deception was not of long duration. The sick man fell into a quiet sleep, but he was waked up half an hour later by his cough. And all at once every hope vanished in those about him and in himself.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Before she had finished speaking, there had come back into his face the stern, reproachful expression of the dying man's envy of the living. 'I am afraid you are not quite comfortable here,' she said, turning away from his fixed stare, and looking about the room. 'We must ask about another room,' she said to her husband, 'so that we might be nearer.' XVIII L EVIN could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself be natural and calm in his presence. When he went in to the sick man, his eyes and his attention were unconsciously dimmed, and he did not see and did not distinguish the details of his brother's position. He smelt the awful odour, saw the dirt, disorder, and miserable condition, and heard the groans, and felt that nothing could be done to help. It never entered his head to analyse the details of the sick man's situation, to consider how that body was lying under the quilt, how those emaciated legs and thighs and spine were lying huddled up, and whether they could not be made more comfortable, whether anything could not be done to make things, if not better, at least less bad. It made his blood run cold when he began to think of all these details. He was absolutely convinced that nothing could be done to prolong his brother's life or to relieve his suffering. But a sense of his regarding all aid as out of the question was felt by the sick man, and exasperated him. And this made it still more painful for Levin. To be in the sick-room was agony to him, not to be there still worse. And he was continually, on various pretexts, going out of the room, and coming in again, because he was unable to remain alone. But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On seeing the sick man, she pitied him. And pity in her womanly heart did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out all the details of his state, and to remedy them. And since she had not the slightest doubt that it was her duty to help him, she had no doubt either that it was possible, and immediately set to work. The very details, the mere thought of which reduced her husband to terror, immediately engaged her attention. She sent for the doctor, sent to the chemist's, set the maid who had come with her and Marya Nikolaevna to sweep and dust and scrub; she herself washed up something, washed out something else, laid something under the quilt. Something was by her directions brought into the sickroom, something else was carried out.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  When they went out the Vronskys' carriage had already driven away. People coming in were still talking of what happened. 'What a horrible death!' said a gentleman, passing by. 'They say he was cut in two pieces.' 'On the contrary, I think it's the easiest—instantaneous,' observed another. 'How is it they don't take proper precautions?' said a third. Madame Karenin seated herself in the carriage, and Stepan Arkadyevitch saw with surprise that her lips were quivering, and she was with difficulty restraining her tears. 'What is it, Anna?' he asked, when they had driven a few hundred yards. 'It's an omen of evil,' she said. 'What nonsense!' said Stepan Arkadyevitch. 'You've come, that's the chief thing. You can't conceive how I'm resting my hopes on you.' 'Have you known Vronsky long?' she asked. 'Yes. You know we're hoping he will marry Kitty.' 'Yes?' said Anna softly. 'Come now, let us talk of you,' she added, tossing her head, as though she would physically shake off something superfluous oppressing her. 'Let us talk of your affairs. I got your letter, and here I am.' 'Yes, all my hopes are in you,' said Stepan Arkadyevitch. 'Well, tell me all about it.' And Stepan Arkadyevitch began to tell his story. On reaching home Oblonsky helped his sister out, sighed, pressed her hand, and set off to his office. XIX W HEN Anna went into the room, Dolly was sitting in the little drawing-room with a white-headed fat little boy, already like his father, giving him a lesson in French reading. As the boy read, he kept twisting and trying to tear off a button that was nearly off his jacket. His mother had several times taken his hand from it, but the fat little hand went back to the button again. His mother pulled the button off and put it in her pocket. 'Keep your hands still, Grisha,' she said, and she took up her work, a coverlet she had long been making. She always set to work on it at depressed moments, and now she knitted at it nervously, twitching her fingers and counting the stitches. Though she had sent word the day before to her husband that it was nothing to her whether his sister came or not, she had made everything ready for her arrival, and was expecting her sister-in-law with emotion. Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up by it. Still she did not forget that Anna, her sister-in-law, was the wife of one of the most important personages in Petersburg, and was a Petersburg grandedame.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  And not for one minute could we leave him alone. We took away everything he could have used against himself. We lived on the ground-floor, but there was no reckoning on anything. You know, of course, that he had shot himself once already on her account,' she said, and the old lady's eyelashes twitched at the recollection. 'Yes, hers was the fitting end for such a woman. Even the death she chose was low and vulgar.' 'It's not for us to judge, countess,' said Sergey Ivanovitch; 'but I can understand that it has been very hard for you.' 'Ah, don't speak of it! I was staying on my estate, and he was with me. A note was brought him. He wrote an answer and sent it off. We hadn't an idea that she was close by at the station. In the evening I had only just gone to my room, when my Mary told me a lady had thrown herself under the train. Something seemed to strike me at once. I knew it was she. The first thing I said was, he was not to be told. But they'd told him already. His coachman was there and saw it all. When I ran into his room, he was beside himself—it was fearful to see him. He didn't say a word, but galloped off there. I don't know to this day what happened there, but he was brought back at death's-door. I shouldn't have known him. Prostration complète, the doctor said. And that was followed almost by madness. Oh, why talk of it!' said the countess with a wave of her hand. 'It was an awful time! No, say what you will, she was a bad woman. Why, what is the meaning of such desperate passions? It was all to show herself something out of the way. Well, and that she did do. She brought herself to ruin and two good men—her husband and my unhappy son.' 'And what did her husband do?' asked Sergey Ivanovitch. 'He has taken her daughter. Alexey was ready to agree to anything at first. Now it worries him terribly that he should have given his own child away to another man. But he can't take back his word. Karenin came to the funeral. But we tried to prevent his meeting Alexey. For him, for her husband, it was easier, anyway. She had set him free. But my poor son was utterly given up to her. He had thrown up everything, his career, me, and even then she had no mercy on him, but of set purpose she made his ruin complete. No, say what you will, her very death was the death of a vile woman, of no religious feeling. God forgive me, but I can't help hating the memory of her, when I look at my son's misery!'

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Darya Alexandrovna had seen that as soon as he glanced into her face; and she felt sorry for him, and her faith in the innocence of her friend began to totter. 'Oh, this is awful, awful! But can it be true that you are resolved on a divorce?' 'I am resolved on extreme measures. There is nothing else for me to do.' 'Nothing else to do, nothing else to do. . .' she replied with tears in her eyes. 'Oh no, don't say nothing else to do!' she said. 'What is horrible in a trouble of this kind is that one cannot, as in any other—in loss, in death—bear one's trouble in peace, but that one must act,' said he, as though guessing her thought. 'One must get out of the humiliating position in which one is placed; one can't live à trois.' 'I understand, I quite understand that,' said Dolly, and her head sank. She was silent for a little, thinking of herself, of her own grief in her family, and all at once, with an impulsive movement, she raised her head and clasped her hands with an imploring gesture. 'But wait a little! You are a Christian. Think of her! What will become of her, if you cast her off?' 'I have thought, Darya Alexandrovna, I have thought a great deal,' said Alexey Alexandrovitch. His face turned red in patches, and his dim eyes looked straight before him. Darya Alexandrovna at that moment pitied him with all her heart. 'That was what I did indeed when she herself made known to me my humiliation; I left everything as of old. I gave her a chance to reform, I tried to save her. And with what result? She would not regard the slightest request—that she should observe decorum,' he said, getting heated. 'One may save anyone who does not want to be ruined; but if the whole nature is so corrupt, so depraved, that ruin itself seems to her salvation, what's to be done?' 'Anything, only not divorce!' answered Darya Alexandrovna. 'But what is anything?' 'No, it is awful! She will be no one's wife; she will be lost!' 'What can I do?' said Alexey Alexandrovitch, raising his shoulders and his eyebrows. The recollection of his wife's last act had so incensed him that he had become frigid, as at the beginning of the conversation. 'I am very grateful for your sympathy, but I must be going,' he said, getting up. 'No, wait a minute. You must not ruin her. Wait a little; I will tell you about myself. I was married, and my husband deceived me; in anger and jealousy, I would have thrown up everything, I would myself . . . But I came to myself again; and who did it? Anna saved me.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin felt that he meant to do something with his hand and was pulling it somewhere. Levin yielded with a sinking heart: yes, he drew it to his mouth and kissed it. Levin, shaking with sobs and unable to articulate a word, went out of the room. XIX ' T HOU hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.' So Levin thought about his wife as he talked to her that evening. Levin thought of the text, not because he considered himself 'wise and prudent.' He did not so consider himself, but he could not help knowing that he had more intellect than his wife and Agafea Mihalovna, and he could not help knowing that when he thought of death, he thought with all the force of his intellect. He knew too that the brains of many great men, whose thoughts he had read, had brooded over death and yet knew not a hundredth part of what his wife and Agafea Mihalovna knew about it. Different as those two women were, Agafea Mihalovna and Katya, as his brother Nikolay had called her, and as Levin particularly liked to call her now, they were quite alike in this. Both knew, without a shade of doubt, what sort of thing life was and what was death, and though neither of them could have answered, and would even not have understood the questions that presented themselves to Levin, both had no doubt of the significance of this event, and were precisely alike in their way of looking at. it, which they shared with millions of people. The proof that they knew for a certainty the nature of death lay in the fact that they knew without a second of hesitation how to deal with the dying, and were not frightened of them. Levin and other men like him, though they could have said a great deal about death, obviously did not know this since they were afraid of death, and were absolutely at a loss what to do when people were dying. If Levin had been alone now with his brother Nikolay, he would have looked at him with terror, and with still greater terror waited, and would not have known what else to do. More than that, he did not know what to say, how to look, how to move. To talk of outside things seemed to him shocking, impossible, to talk of death and depressing subjects—also impossible. To be silent, also impossible.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'That is he. I knew him! Now, forgive me, everyone, forgive me! … They've come again; why don't they go away? . . . Oh, take these cloaks off me!' The doctor unloosed her hands, carefully laying her on the pillow, and covered her up to the shoulders. She lay back submissively, and looked before her with beaming eyes. 'Remember one thing, that I needed nothing but forgiveness, and I want nothing more. . . Why doesn't he come?' she said, turning to the door towards Vronsky. 'Do come, do come! Give him your hand.' Vronsky came to the side of the bed, and seeing Anna, again hid his face in his hands. 'Uncover your face—look at him! He's a saint,' she said. 'Oh! uncover your face, do uncover it!' she said angrily. 'Alexey Alexandrovitch, do uncover his face! I want to see him. Alexey Alexandrovitch took Vronsky's hands and drew them away from his face, which was awful with the expression of agony and shame upon it. 'Give him your hand. Forgive him.' Alexey Alexandrovitch gave him his hand, not attempting to restrain the tears that streamed from his eyes. 'Thank God, thank God!' she said, 'now everything is ready. Only to stretch my legs a little. There, that's capital. How badly these flowers are done—not a bit like a violet,' she said, pointing to the hangings. 'My God, my God! when will it end? Give me some morphine. Doctor, give me some morphine. Oh, my God, my God!' And she tossed about on the bed. The doctors said that it was puerperal fever, and that it was ninety-nine chances in a hundred it would end in death. The whole day long there was fever, delirium, and unconsciousness. At midnight the patient lay without consciousness, and almost without pulse. The end was expected every minute. Vronsky had gone home, but in the morning he came to inquire, and Alexey Alexandrovitch meeting him in the hall, said: 'Better stay, she might ask for you,' and himself led him to his wife's boudoir. Towards morning there was a return again of excitement, rapid thought and talk, and again it ended in unconsciousness. On the third day it was the same thing, and the doctors said there was hope. That day Alexey Alexandrovitch went into the boudoir where Vronsky was sitting, and closing the door sat down opposite him. 'Alexey Alexandrovitch,' said Vronsky, feeling that a statement of the position was coming, 'I can't speak, I can't understand. Spare me! However hard it is for you, believe me, it is more terrible for me.'

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Besides, in the little girl everything was still in the future, while Seryozha was by now almost a personality, and a personality dearly loved. In him there was a conflict of thought and feeling; he understood her, he loved her, he judged her, she thought, recalling his words and his eyes. And she was for ever—not physically only but spiritually—divided from him, and it was impossible to set this right. She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and opened the locket in which there was Seryozha's portrait when he was almost of the same age as the girl. She got up, and, taking off her hat, took up from a little table an album in which there were photographs of her son at different ages. She wanted to compare them, and began taking them out of the album. She took them all out except one, the latest and best photograph. In it he was in a white smock, sitting astride a chair, with frowning eyes and smiling lips. It was his best, most characteristic expression. With her little supple hands, her white, delicate fingers, that moved with a peculiar intensity today, she pulled at a corner of the photograph, but the photograph had caught somewhere, and she could not get it out. There was no paper-knife on the table, and so, pulling out the photograph that was next her son's (it was a photograph of Vronsky taken at Rome in a round hat and with long hair), she used it to push out her son's photograph. 'Oh, here is he!' she said, glancing at the portrait of Vronsky, and she suddenly recalled that he was the cause of her present misery. She had not once thought of him all the morning. But now, coming all at once upon that manly, noble face, so familiar and so dear to her, she felt a sudden rush of love for him. 'But where is he? How is it he leaves me alone in my misery?' she thought all at once with a feeling of reproach, forgetting she had herself kept from him everything concerning her son. She sent to ask him to come to her immediately; with a throbbing heart she awaited him, rehearsing to herself the words in which she would tell him all, and the expressions of love with which he would console her. The messenger returned with the answer that he had a visitor with him, but that he would come immediately, and that he asked whether she would let him bring with him Prince Yashvin, who had just arrived in Petersburg. 'He's not coming alone, and since dinner yesterday he has not seen me,' she thought; 'he's not coming so that I could tell him everything, but coming with Yashvin.' And all at once a strange idea came to her: what if he had ceased to love her?

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  A pretty business!' When the nurse went into the nursery, Seryozha was telling his mother how he and Nadinka had had a fall in sledging downhill, and had turned over three times. She was listening to the sound of his voice, watching his face and the play of expression on it, touching his hand, but she did not follow what he was saying. She must go, she must leave him,—this was the only thing she was thinking and feeling. She heard the steps of Vassily Lukitch coming up to the door and coughing; she heard, too, the steps of the nurse as she came near; but she sat like one turned to stone, incapable of beginning to speak or to get up. 'Mistress, darling!' began the nurse, going up to Anna and kissing her hands and shoulders. 'God has brought joy indeed to our boy on his birthday. You aren't changed one bit.' 'Oh, nurse dear, I didn't know you were in the house,' said Anna, rousing herself for a moment. 'I'm not living here, I'm living with my daughter. I came for the birthday, Anna Arkadyevna, darling.' The nurse suddenly burst into tears, and began kissing her hand again. Seryozha, with radiant eyes and smiles, holding his mother by one hand and his nurse by the other, pattered on the rug with his fat little bare feet. The tenderness shown by his beloved nurse to his mother threw him into an ecstasy. 'Mother! She often comes to see me, and when she comes . . . ' he was beginning, but he stopped, noticing that the nurse was saying something in a whisper to his mother, and that in his mother's face there was a look of dread and something like shame, which was so strangely unbecoming to her. She went up to him. 'My sweet!' she said. She could not say good-bye, but the expression on her face said it, and he understood. 'Darling, darling Kootik!' she used the name by which she had called him when he was little, 'you won't forget me? You . . . ' but she could not say more. How often afterwards she thought of words she might have said. But now she did not know how to say it, and could say nothing. But Seryozha knew all she wanted to say to him. He understood that she was unhappy and loved him. He understood even what the nurse had whispered.