Book: The insulted and injured

However, we must admit everything frankly: whether the nerve was upset, whether from new impressions in a new apartment, from the recent blues, but little by little and gradually, from the very onset of dusk, I began to fall into that state of mind that so often comes to me now, and which I call mystical horror. This is the most severe, painful fear of something that I myself cannot define, something incomprehensible and non-existent in the order of things, but which will certainly, perhaps, this very minute, come true, as if in a mockery of all the arguments of reason will come to it will appear before me as an irresistible fact, terrible, ugly and implacable. This fear usually grows stronger and stronger, in spite of any arguments of reason, so that finally the mind, in spite of the fact that at these moments, perhaps even greater clarity, nevertheless loses all possibility of opposing sensations. They do not obey him, he becomes useless, and this dichotomy further increases the fearful longing of expectation. It seems to me that this is partly the longing of people who are afraid of the dead. But in my anguish, the uncertainty of the danger further aggravates the torment.