Anguish

[ Gollum speaking of the Ring :] Where iss it? Where iss it? . . . Losst it is, my precious, lost, lost! Curse us and crush us, my precious is lost!

 

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.

 

I do not know, but I feel it happen and am in agony.

 

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior .

 

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

I hate and love. You ask, perhaps, how that can be? / I know not, but I feel the agony.

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.

I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do so. I do not know, but I feel it, and am in agony.

Thoughts are tyrants that return again and again to torment us.

 

I can’t sleep.

‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said

 

But what am I?

 

It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden.

 

Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again?

 

But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

 

A still small voice spake unto me, “Thou art so full of misery, Were it not better not to be?”

 

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant recoverthis time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary

I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage.

[ On Ted Williams’s last baseball game at FenwayPark, Boston, Mass. :] Our noise for someseconds passed beyond excitement into akind of immense open anguish, a cry to besaved. But immortality is nontransferable. Thepapers said that the other players, and eventhe umpires on the field, begged him to comeout and acknowledge us in some way, but henever had and did not now. Gods do not answerletters.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucketof whitewash and a long-handled brush. Hesurveyed the fence, and all gladness left himand a deep melancholy settled down upon hisspirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feethigh. Life to him seemed hollow, and existencebut a burden.

The mass of men lead lives of quietdesperation. What is called resignation isconfirmed desperation.

Our throats were tight as tourniquets.