Micah Webber > Recent Status Updates

“Because,” he said, “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you…it is as if I had string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. …I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.”

And then I strangled a new-born agony—a deformed thing which I could not persuade myself to own and rear—and ran on.

Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.

“Sir,” I answered, “a wanderer’s repose or a sinner’s reformation should never depend on a fellow-creature. Men and women die; philosopher’s falter in wisdom, and Christian’s in goodness: if anyone you know has suffered and erred, let him look higher than his equals for strength to amend and solace to heal.”

“Your brow professes to say ‘I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.’“

[H]is attention was riveted on them, … I might gaze without being observed, … my eyes were drawn involuntarily to his face. I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking—a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.

When once more alone, I reviewed the information I had got; looked into my heart, examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavoured to bring back with a strict hand such as had been straying through imagination’s boundless and trackless waste, into the safe fold of common sense.

Till morning dawned I was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea, where billows of trouble rolled under surges of joy. I thought sometimes I saw beyond its wild waters a shore, sweet as the hills of Beulah; and now and then a freshening gale, wakened by hope, bore my spirit triumphantly towards the bourne: but I could not reach it, even in fancy—a counteracting breeze blew off land, and continually drove me back.

I could not help it; the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it—and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement . . .

“‘…and God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness - to glory?’

I was silent: Helen had calmed me; but in the tranquillity she imparted there was an alloy of inexpressible sadness. I felt the impression of woe as she spoke…”

“‘Is he a good man?’

‘He is a clergyman, and is said to do a great deal of good.’”

“‘Come, Miss Jane, don’t cry,’ said Bessie, as she finished. She might as well have said to the fire, ‘Don’t burn!’ but how could she divine the morbid suffering to which I was a prey?”

“Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive.”

“Some of us, if consciences had toenails, would be hanging on by just that margin. Yet conscience must find ways to go on operating inside history.”

What one of them should have been saying was “We’re in the last minutes of a break that will seem so wonderful and peaceable and carefree.. . . Stay, or go. Two fates beginning to diverge—back to the U.S., marry, raise a family, assemble a life you can persuade yourself is free from fear, as meanwhile, over here, the other outcome continues to unfold, to roll in dark as the end of time.

“Ace by now is drifting into middle age. Beginning to find himself approached by practiced fingers reaching from the other world, to bring him away, one stitch at a time, into a crazy quilt he might never know more of than a few patches adjoining, crazy and lost as himself.”

“They proceed at a brisk pace past the shadowed Spanish melancholy of the abandoned Plaza del Lago, maintaining in the dark its vigil for the return of Prosperity.”

“Since they got married, Peony’s conversation has steadily been taking on an edge, her natural nerve coming out to shine, as if some maidenly spirit, searching and pious, has set out on a trip Peony has no plans herself to make, toward a destiny quietly lifted away from her when she wasn’t looking . . .”

“Far as he knows, Skeet was one of those Christmas babies left in a straw box for the MPD to find. . . The little shacks had hay all over the floor to keep those flat feet warm and door-kicking-ready, reminding people so much of the manger in Bethlehem that when the Depression struck in earnest it became a practice at Christmas for desperate parents to leave babies not only at church doorsteps…

“That was the night of a storm that would not be a famous storm. But. . . it drove the wet harvest along the gutters and into the gaping drains and down into the unknown avenues of the great sewers. The blood of births was sluiced down there too, and all the many liquids of humanity, but the salt sea at Ringsend took everything equally.”

Of Victor, by Walton: “What a glorious creature must he have been in the days of his prosperity, when he is thus noble and godlike in ruin! He seems to feel his own worth and the greatness of his fall.”

She looked forward to our union with placid contentment, not unmingled with a little fear, which past misfortunes had impressed, that what now appeared certain and tangible happiness might soon dissipate into an airy dream and leave no trace but deep and everlasting regret.
. . .I shut up, as well as I could, in my own heart the anxiety that preyed there…”

“I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me, and finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.”

“Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned? I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat! Of what a strange nature is knowledge!