It was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows
less real than the earth. I could conceive no joy, no pleasure
in inhabiting it. Happiness, joy, light, affection, love-- all
these words were now devoid of sense. Without doubt I could
still have talked of all these things, but I had become incapable
of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about
them, of hoping anything from them, or of believing them to
exist. There was my great and inconsolable grief! I neither
perceived nor conceived any longer the existence of happiness or
perfection. An abstract heaven over a naked rock. Such was my
present abode for eternity."[77]
[77] A. Gratry: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119-121,
abridged. Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently,
or at any rate with a loss of the usual appetite for life. The
annals of suicide supply such examples as the following:--
An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen, poisons herself,
and leaves two letters expressing her motive for the act. To her
parents she writes:--
"Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what is sweeter than
life, and that is death.
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