| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: seemed to be dressed in mourning and groaning, under the weight
of the curse, and everything around me seemed to be conspiring my
ruin. My sins seemed to be laid open; so that I thought that
every one I saw knew them, and sometimes I was almost ready to
acknowledge many things, which I thought they knew: yea
sometimes it seemed to me as if every one was pointing me out as
the most guilty wretch upon earth. I had now so great a sense of
the vanity and emptiness of all things here below, that I knew
the whole world could not possibly make me happy, no, nor the
whole system of creation. When I waked in the morning, the first
thought would be, Oh, my wretched soul, what shall I do, where
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad: power to call Fate down upon the earth, like those strange and
appalling words that sometimes are heard in sleep. They vibrated round
him in a metallic atmosphere, in a space that had the hardness of iron
and the resonance of a bell of bronze. Looking down between the toes
of his boots he seemed to listen thoughtfully to the receding wave of
sound; to the wave spreading out in a widening circle, embracing
streets, roofs, church-steeples, fields--and travelling away, widening
endlessly, far, very far, where he could not hear--where he could not
imagine anything--where . . .
"And--with that . . . ass," he said again without stirring in the
least. And there was nothing but humiliation. Nothing else. He could
Tales of Unrest |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: fortune. So we note here the neurotic constitution, of which I
said so much in my first lecture, making its active entrance on
our scene, and destined to play a part in much that follows.
Since these experiences of melancholy are in the first instance
absolutely private and individual, I can now help myself out with
personal documents. Painful indeed they will be to listen to,
and there is almost an indecency in handling them in public. Yet
they lie right in the middle of our path; and if we are to touch
the psychology of religion at all seriously, we must be willing
to forget conventionalities, and dive below the smooth and lying
official conversational surface.
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