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Page 1 of 11929 · PDF PAGE 49
…corruption now assumed a gross chemistry. The gases of putrefaction forming in the brain and interpenetrating it were represented in his consciousness by the denizens of the pustules becoming formless and impersonalArthur had not yet fathomed the abyss. Creeping, winding, embracing, the Universe en- folded him, violated him with a nameless and intimate contamination, involved his being in a more suffocating terror. Now and again it drowned that consciousness in a gulf which his thought could not express to me; and in- deed the first and least …
1929 · PDF PAGE 43
…y hu- miliation of that part of him that was rejected. I shall not attempt to describe the final process; suf- fice it that the demoniac consciousness drew away; he was but the excrement of the demon, and as that ex- crement he was flung filthily further into the abyss of blackness and of night whose name is death. I rose with ashen cheeks. I stammered: He is dead. The male nurse bent over the body. Yes! he echoed, he is dead. And it seemed as if the whole Uni- verse gathered itself into one ghastly laugh of hate and horror, Dead! V I r…
1929 · PDF PAGE 42
…is conviction had not fully impregnated the con- sciousness of Arthur; it hung over him like a threat, while the intensification of that consciousness, its libera- tion from the sense of time natural to life, caused each act of the demon to appear of vast duration, although the intervals between the howls of the body on the bed were very short. Each pang of torture or suspense was born, rose to its crest, and died to be reborn again through what seemed countless aeons. Still more was this the case in the process of his as- similation by the de…
1929 · PDF PAGE 51
… was Arthur? His brain, his individuality, his life, were utterly de- stroyed. As separate things, yes: Arthur had entered the universal consciousness. And I heard this utterance: or rather this is my translation into English of a single thought whose syn- thesis is Woe. Substance is called spirit or matter. Spirit and matter are one, indivisible, eternal, inde- structible. Infinite and eternal change! Infinite and eternal pain! No absolute: no truth, no beauty, no idea, nothing but the whirlwinds of form, unresting, unappeasable. Eternal hun…
1929 · PDF PAGE 45
…ean of bowels below the falling soul. This ocean seemed to be limitless. It fell headlong into it, and the splash awak- ened it to a new consciousness of things. This sea, though infinitely cold, was boiling like tu- bercles. Itself a more or less homogeneous slime, the stench of which is beyond all human conception (human language is singularly deficient in words that describe smell and taste; we always refer our sensations to things generally known)2 it constantly budded into greenish boils with angry red craters, whose jagged edges were of a…
1929 · PDF PAGE 41
… seemed to me as if some mystic state were su- per-added to the torment; for while he was not, em- phatically not, this tortured mass of consciousness, yet that was he. There are always at least two of us! The one who feels and the one who knows are not radically one person. This double personality is enormously ac- centuated at death. Another point was that the time-sense, which with men is usually so reliableespecially in my own case was decidedly deranged, if not abrogated altogether.
1929 · PDF PAGE 25
…enty-four I am a shrivelled, blasted, withered wreck, I am supremely weary, supremely indif- ferent. I have the heart of a child and the consciousness of Satan, the lethargy of I know not what disease; and yet, thankoh! there can be no God!the resolution to warn mankind to follow my example, and then to explode a dynamite cartridge in my mouth. II In my third year at Newnham I spend four hours of every day at Professor Blairs house. All other work was neglected, gone through mechanically, if at all. This came about gradually, as the result o…
1929 · PDF PAGE 29
…d not know consciously that he had cancer; but subconsciously Nature gave warning. You read this subconsciously, and it sprang into your consciousness when you read on the nurse's face that he was ill. This, farfetched as it may seem, at least avoids the shallow theories about telepathy. From this time my powers constantly increased. I could read my husband's thoughts from imperceptible movements of his face as easily as a trained deaf-mute can sometimes read the speech of a distant man from the movements of his lips. Gradually as we worked,…
1929 · PDF PAGE 46
…, and in every case each leg was suffering with all diseases from leprosy and elephantiasis to scrofula and syphilis. There was also the consciousness that this was inalienably and for ever part of Arthur. Then Italy itself, in every detail foul. Then I myself, seen as every woman that has ever been, each one with every disease and torture that Nature and man have plotted in their hellish brains, each ended with a death, a death like Arthur's, whose infinite pangs were added to his own, recognized and accepted as his own. The same with our chil…
1929 · PDF PAGE 35
also on those of his subconsciousness when coma inhib- ited consciousness. It is this experiment that I now force myself to nar- rate. The prologue has been long; it has been necessary to put the facts before mankind in a simple way so that they may seize the opportunity of the proper kind of suicide. I beg my readers most earnestly not to doubt my statements: the notes of our experiments, left in my will to the greatest thinker now living, Professor von Buhle, will make clear the truth of my relation, and the great and terrible necessity of im…
1929 · PDF PAGE 47
And yet we know how tumour of the brain begets hallu- cinations. Consciousness works strangely; the least dis- turbance of the blood supply, and it goes out like a can- dle, or else takes monstrous forms. Here was the overwhelming truth; in death man lives again, and lives for ever. Yet we might have thought of it; the phantasmagoria of life which throng the mind of a drowning man might have suggested something of the sort to any man with a sympathetic and active imagination. Worse even than the thoughts themselves was the apprehension of the t…
1929 · PDF PAGE 22
…four molars, smashed the cheek-bone, pulped the right eye, and, glancing from the frontal bone, found its billet in the ceiling. He lost consciousness and fell. His head struck the grate where yet smouldered the ashes of the photograph.
1929 · PDF PAGE 44
…f his brain and body. All the other phenomena had been shown to correspond exactly with a physical condition; it was the reflection in a consciousness from which human limitation had fallen away of things actu- ally taking place in the body. It was a false interpretation perhaps; but it was his interpretation; and it was that which caused suffering so beyond all that poets have ever dreamt of the infernal. I am ashamed to say that my first thought was of the Catholic Church and its masses for the repose of the dead. I went to the Cathedral, rev…