Three bits which stuck with me recently from the classic novel.
Isn’t this exactly how it feels to wake up in the middle of the night?
He opened his eyes and stared into the gloom which surrounded him; then he closed them again, with the intention of going to sleep once more.
When many varied sensations have agitated the day, when various matters preoccupy the mind, one falls asleep once, but not a second time. Sleep comes more easily than it returns. This is what happened to Jean Valjean. He could not get to sleep again, and he fell to thinking.
This description of a selfish, manipulative couple who take advantage of others nails it…
These beings belonged to that mongrl class composed of commoners who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended in the scale, which is between the class called “middle” and the class denominated as “lower,” and which combines some of the defects of the second with nearly all the vices of the first.
They were of those dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to warm them up, easily become monstrous. There was in the woman a substratum of the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard. Both were susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous progress which is accomplished in the direction of evil. There exist crab-like souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness, retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness. This man and woman possessed such souls.
And here the author is about to describe the inner workings of a man’s conscience. He sets up his trip into a man’s soul with these words…
There is nothing more terrible in existence than this sort of contemplation. The eye of the spirit can nowhere find more dazzling brilliance and more shadow than in man; it can fix itself on no other thing which is more formidable, more complicated, more mysterious, and more infinite. There is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is the sky: there is a spectacle more grand than the sky; it is the inmost recesses of the soul.
To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only with reference to a single man, were it only in connection with the basest of men, would be to blend all epics into one superior and definitive epic. Conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts, and of temptations; the furnace of dreams; the lair of ideas of which we are ashamed; it is the battlefield of the passions. Penetrate, at certain hours, past the livid face of a human being who is engaged in reflection, and look behind, gaze into that soul, gaze into that obscurity. There, beneath that external silence, battles of giants, like those recorded in Homer, are in progress; skirmishes of dragons and hydras and swarms of phantoms, as in Milton; visionary circles, as in Dante. What a solemn thing is this infinity which every man bears within him, and which he measures with despair against what his brain wants and what his life puts into action!