“The soulless have no need of melancholia”

“(Uncle) would remark that it was impossible to get by without such a (portentous and whimsical) tone when speaking of many things of this world, and especially of the things not entirely of this world.”

“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness."No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

“Solitude was corrupting me. I needed company and care.”

“I felt my life needed a shake-up.”

“I need but say that my most vivid impression in that respect was a mere trifle: one day, on Million Street in St. Petersburg, a truck packed with jolly rioters made a clumsy but accurate swerve so as to deliberately squash a passing cat which remained lying there, as a perfectly flat, neatly ironed, black rag (only the tail still belonged to a cat -- it stood upright, and the tip, I think, still moved). At the time this struck me with some deep occult meaning, but I have since have occasion to see a bus, in a bucolic Spanish village, flatten by exactly the same method an exactly similar cat, so I have become disenchanted with hidden meanings.”

“My God died young. Theolatry i foundDegrading, and its premises, unsound.No free man needs God; but was I free?”