One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, "I am lying here in the dark waiting for death." The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, "Oh, nonsense!" and stood over him as if transfixed.Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror - of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision - he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath - "The horror! The horror!"I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly the manager's boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt -"Mistah Kurtz - he dead.
You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies -which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world -what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.
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You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies -which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world -what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.
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Being comfortable with the lies can be catastrophic.
Not that it was a crazy complicated skill, but operating an espresso machine during high traffic could be added to my repertoire along with card tricks and how to fire a Colt .45.(Quote taken from ARC, subject to change)
There is one kind of laugh that I always did recommend; it looks out of the eye first with a merry twinkle, then it creeps down on its hands and knees and plays around the mouth like a pretty moth around the blaze of a candle, then it steals over into the dimples of the cheeks and rides around in those whirlpools for a while, then it lights up the whole face like the mellow bloom on a damask rose, then it swims up on the air, with a peal as clear and as happy as a dinner-bell, then it goes back again on gold tiptoes like an angel out for an airing, and it lies down on its little bed of violets in the heart where it came from.
But evil is always illusion. It insists on the lie that we can have something for ourselves. This is the sole principle at work in hell. Lucifer chose to believe it; or, since it is unimaginable that he actually could have believed it, then we may say that he chose to pretend it might be. Very well, says Truth, you may pretend this. But the pretense will be, literally, your undoing. It will unmake you. You will have opted for something that is not, namely, a lie. Hell is built of lies.
Ritually abusive groups also convince children that something evil has been put inside them. For example, a child is made to believe he or she has a "black heart" - seeing the abuser holding an animal heart and then feeling severe chest pain while it is supposedly inserted. In "brain transplants", the brain of an abuser or of a despised animal such as a rate is supposedly put into a child. Children are told that they are demons or monsters or aliens, or internal copies of an abuser whose "seed" has been implanted by rape.Ch29, p324