And so, with mad antics, leaping, reeling, and over-balancing, we danced and sang in the sombre twilight of the primeval world, inducing
forgetfulness, achieving unanimity, and working ourselves up into sensuous frenzy.
Crossing glittering avenues, she went into the throng emerging from the places of
forgetfulness. She hurried forward through the crowd as if intent upon reaching a distant home, bending forward in her handsome cloak, daintily lifting her skirts and picking for her well-shod feet the dryer spots upon the pavements.
"Monsieur," said the king at length, "you spoke the word
forgetfulness. I have heard nothing but that word; I will reply, then, to it alone.
She smiled, as if in pity at her own momentary
forgetfulness, discovering by the act a row of teeth that would have shamed the purest ivory; when, replacing the veil, she bowed her face, and rode in silence, like one whose thoughts were abstracted from the scene around her.
for that there was no atonement; but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was possible still, and he was determined to forget, to stamp the thing out, to crush it as one would crush the adder that had stung one.
They were what he needed for forgetfulness. In three days he would be free.
Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her--doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame.
A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual remembrance.
It seems as though the brightest side of everything were also its highest and best, so that as our little lives sink back behind us into the dark sea of forgetfulness, all that which is the lightest and the most gladsome is the last to sink, and stands above the waters, long in sight, when the angry thoughts and smarting pain are buried deep below the waves and trouble us no more.
Do you remember Dickens' "Haunted Man"--how he prayed for forgetfulness, and how, when his prayer was answered, he prayed for memory once more?
And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved and has not perished, and will save us if we are obedient to the word spoken; and we shall pass safely over the river of
Forgetfulness and our soul will not be defiled.
More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into
forgetfulness and rest?