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- 7859
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 7825
- text
- be covered with an all-pervading haze of incurable sinisterness,
possibly not to be removed even in the concluding hour of death.
Such, oh thou son of man! are the perils and the miseries thou callest
down on thee, when, even in a virtuous cause, thou steppest aside from
those arbitrary lines of conduct, by which the common world, however
base and dastardly, surrounds thee for thy worldly good.
Ofttimes it is very wonderful to trace the rarest and profoundest
things, and find their probable origin in something extremely trite or
trivial. Yet so strange and complicate is the human soul; so much is
confusedly evolved from out itself, and such vast and varied accessions
come to it from abroad, and so impossible is it always to distinguish
between these two, that the wisest man were rash, positively to assign
the precise and incipient origination of his final thoughts and acts.
Far as we blind moles can see, man's life seems but an acting upon
mysterious hints; it is somehow hinted to us, to do thus or thus. For
surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever
pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own
defined identity. This preamble seems not entirely unnecessary as usher
of the strange conceit, that possibly the latent germ of Pierre's
proposed extraordinary mode of executing his proposed extraordinary
resolve--namely, the nominal conversion of a sister into a wife--might
have been found in the previous conversational conversion of a mother
into a sister; for hereby he had habituated his voice and manner to a
certain fictitiousness in one of the closest domestic relations of life;
and since man's moral texture is very porous, and things assumed upon
the surface, at last strike in--hence, this outward habituation to the
above-named fictitiousness had insensibly disposed his mind to it as it
were; but only innocently and pleasantly as yet. If, by any possibility,
this general conceit be so, then to Pierre the times of sportfulness
were as pregnant with the hours of earnestness; and in sport he learnt
the terms of woe.
- title
- Chunk 5