I have suffered from nightmares my whole life. I do not have regular dreams. On good nights, they are like an entertaining cheap horror movie. On worse nights, they are convincing life ending scenarios which I am convinced on. But the worst nightmares of all where after I was reading Sartor Resartus. They had no narrative or series of different, they were just images, but the horror which I felt perceiving them was so tangible and visceral that it cast a pall over my day and my entire life.
One of them was an image from one of the most evocative passages in
Carlyle, which is of young men blowing the life out of each other on the battlefield and their bodies emptied of life like eggshells. Eggs are a recurrent symbol of death in Western art. Everything about them just seems unnatural and manufactured. The other was the filthy black water. I can describe it like corroded stillbirth made from this liquified rotting flesh and human filth. Somewhat like raw sewage, grey water. It was rising up around me. Then there was the concrete hole with the metal bar in it. It was not unlike the places where the American military would torture Iraqis with sleep deprivation. Something you would see in the No Man's Last of East Ukraine on a grainy livestream. It represented the total negation of humanity.
I think the point which Sartor is trying to make is that life is just a sequence of images that we tie together and try to make sense of when there is none. All sense which we make is ultimately artificial. The argument is compelling for its lack of argument, from the way it channels the unknowable divine. It was horrifying to read a writer from the Victorian era write like none of them had written. I found
Mill and
Spencer truly dryasdust. It was as if the words stared at you through time itself. Nothing is more horrifying than seeing the past come to life. It is how that atavism is still there, the most powerful argument for the total depravity of human beings. No advance of science and civilization can take you out of the Cabin of the Poor-Slaves with it’s walls drenched in cold sweat.
I’m always happy to wake up. But never so much as after I read this book. Most of the time my nightmares are just stuff you would see in a cheesy horror movie or horrible life-ending scenarios that are so vivid that when I open my eyes. This book is like staring into the eyes of those postmortem photos of dead babies from the Victorian Era. You can feel the polished leather of a fascist boot on your neck.