"And then when all around grows dark, when we feel utterly alone, when all men right and left pass us by and know us not, a forgotten feeling rises in the breast"
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Darkness here isn’t weather; it’s social eclipse. Muller stacks clauses the way isolation actually arrives: not in a single blow, but in accumulating confirmations that you’ve slipped out of other people’s field of vision. “All around grows dark” sets the mood, then he narrows the lens to the most cutting modern fear: being physically present yet socially unreadable. “All men right and left pass us by and know us not” captures alienation as a street-level experience, a crowd that refuses to certify your existence.
The craft is in the shift from external to internal. Once the world is stripped of recognition, “a forgotten feeling rises in the breast” suggests not a new revelation but a buried reflex. Muller, a 19th-century educator steeped in comparative religion and language, is implicitly arguing that beneath the varnish of rational progress sits something older and sturdier: a latent hunger for meaning, belonging, maybe even the divine. His era loved to imagine that education and modernity would replace superstition; he’s more skeptical. When the social fabric thins, the psyche raids its deep storage.
The subtext is almost pedagogical: loneliness isn’t just sadness, it’s a condition that reactivates ancestral equipment. “Forgotten” is the tell. Muller implies we didn’t eliminate those needs; we merely learned to ignore them while life is bright and busy. In the dark, the mind remembers what the daylight lets it forget.
The craft is in the shift from external to internal. Once the world is stripped of recognition, “a forgotten feeling rises in the breast” suggests not a new revelation but a buried reflex. Muller, a 19th-century educator steeped in comparative religion and language, is implicitly arguing that beneath the varnish of rational progress sits something older and sturdier: a latent hunger for meaning, belonging, maybe even the divine. His era loved to imagine that education and modernity would replace superstition; he’s more skeptical. When the social fabric thins, the psyche raids its deep storage.
The subtext is almost pedagogical: loneliness isn’t just sadness, it’s a condition that reactivates ancestral equipment. “Forgotten” is the tell. Muller implies we didn’t eliminate those needs; we merely learned to ignore them while life is bright and busy. In the dark, the mind remembers what the daylight lets it forget.
Quote Details
| Topic | Loneliness |
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