There is nothing like great writing. Here are a few spots from Les Miserables…
Hugo is describing the night sky just before the city explodes with rioting. I should leave my comment until after you read it to see if it brings to your mind the same thing it does to mine .. but I will go ahead and put it here. I could not help but think of how the sky reflected what was happening at the Cross. –
As it often happens, nature seemed to have fallen into accord with what men were about to do. Nothing disturbed the harmony of the whole effect. The stars had disappeared, heavy clouds filled the horizon with their melancholy folds. A black sky rested on these dead streets, as though an immense winding-sheet were being outspread over this immense tomb.
And this description of encountering spirit-shattering pain –
Until this day, Jean Valjean had never been defeated by any ordeal. he had been subjected to horrific trials and tribulations; not a single assault and battery of an ill-starred life had ever been spared him; the ferocity of fate, armed with every act of vengeance and ever kind of social scorn, had been taken him up and hounded him relentlessly.
It was because, of all the tortures which he had undergone in the course of this long inquisition to which destiny had doomed him, this was the most terrible. Never had such a vice had him in its grip. He felt the mysterious stirring of all his latent sensibilities. He felt the plucking at the strange chord. Alas! the supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the one you love.
You can collapse inside. A despairing certainty does not penetrate a man without pushing aside and sundering certain deep features that are sometimes the man himself. When pain reaches that level, all the forces of a man’s conscience stampeded.
And the description of pain concludes with this consideration of its particular effect upon the aged –
Great pain brings great weariness with it. It dampens the will to live. The man it enters feels something go out of him. In his youth, their visits are gloomy; later on they are sinister. Alas, when the blood is hot, when the hair is black, when the head is erect on the body like the flame on the torch, when the roll of destiny still retains its full thickness, when the heart, full of desirable love, still possesses beats which can be returned to it, when one has time for redress, when the force of life is at it fullest – if despair is an appalling thing even so, what is it in old age, when the years hasten on, growing ever paler, to that twilight hour when one begins to behold the stars of the tomb?