Micah Webber > Recent Status Updates

“If any other man had told this dream, / a fiction, we should call it; we’d be wary. / But he who saw the vision is our king. / Up with you, and we’ll put the men in arms.”

Anger be now your song, immortal one, / Akhilleus’ anger, doomed and ruinous, / that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss / and crowded brave souls into the undergloom, / leaving so many dead men—carrion / for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.

Oh, it was darker now in the room. There was a poison slipping easily through Willie's veins. The poison of disappointment and new horror. Never in all his days had he seen his father so chill and strange, the deep voice corrupted by anger, sounding like the terrifying voice of a stranger, of another. Never in his life had he even heard any such speech from his father, using words out of parades and ceremonies.

But he fell down between the boards of memory and sleep like a penny in an old floor. He lay there in the dust of nowhere, sunken and alone.

The water touched them like a mother, soothing their backs and legs, and flowed around their genitals like the long hair of a lover.
“Jesus, that’s better,” said Christy Moran.
“Fucking hell,” said McNaughtan.
“Holy Mother Church and all her saints,” said Smith.
“For the love of Jesus and his Divine Mother and the Holy Ghost too into the bargain,” said another slightly submerged voice.

No harassing restraint, no repressing of glee and vivacity with him; for with him I was at perfect ease, because I knew I suited him; all I said or did seemed either to console or revive him. Delightful consciousness! It brought to life and light my whole nature: in his presence I thoroughly lived; and he lived in mine. Blind as he was, smiles played over his face, joy dawned on his forehead, his lineaments softened.

I was tempted to cease struggling with him - to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own. I was almost as hard beset by him now as I had been once before, in a different way, by another. I was a fool both times. To have yielded then would have been an error of principle; to have yielded now would have been an error of judgment.

Literally, he lived only to aspire—after what was good and great, certainly; but still he would never rest, nor approve of others resting…

I saw he was of the material from which nature hews her heroes—Christian and Pagan—her lawgivers, her statesmen, her conquerors: a steadfast bulwark for great interests to rest upon; but, at the fireside, too often a cold Cumbria’s column, gloomy and out of place.

My eyes were covered and closed: eddying darkness seemed to swim round me, and reflection came in as black and confused a flow. Self-abandoned, relaxed, and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, and felt the torrent come: to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength. I lay faint, longing to be dead.

“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.”