III. Anger has also its dreams and reveries. When wronged the imagination
riots in fancied humiliation and even tortures of an enemy. An object of
hate may be put through almost every conceivable series of degradation,
ridicule, exposure and disgrace. He is seen by others for what our hate
deems him to be. All disguises are stripped off. Children sometimes fancy a
hated object of anger flogged until he is raw, abandoned by all his friends,
an outcast, homeless, alone, in the dark, starving, exposed to wild animals,
and far more often more prosaic fancies conceive him as whipped by a parent
or stronger friend, or by the victim himself later. Very clever strategies
are thought out in detail by which the weaker gets even with or vanquishes
the stronger, and one who suffers a rankling sense of injustice can hardly
help day-dreaming of some form of comeuppance for his foe, although it takes
years to do it. In these reveries the injurer in the end almost always gives
up and sues for mercy at the feet of his quondam victim. So weird and
dramatic are these scenes often that to some minds we must call anger and
hate the chief springs of the imagination. A pubescent girl who was deeply
offended went off by herself and held an imaginary funeral of her enemy,
hearing in fancy the disparaging remarks of the bystanders, and when it was
all over and the reaction came, she made up with the object of her passion
by being unusually sweet to her and even became solicitous about her health
as fearing that her revery might come true. We all too remember Tolstoi's
reminiscences when, having been flogged by his tutor, he slunk off to the
attic, weeping and broken-hearted, and finally after a long brooding
resolved to run away and become a soldier, and this he did in fancy,
becoming corporal, lieutenant, captain, colonel. Finally came a great
battle where he led a desperate charge that was crowned with victory, and
when all was over and he stood tottering, leaning on his sword, bloody and
with many a wound, and the great Czar of all the Russias approached, saluted
him as saviour of his fatherland and told him to ask whatever he wanted and
it was his, replied magnanimously that he had only done his duty and wanted
no reward. All he asked was that his tutor might be brought up and his head
cut off. Then the scene changed to other situations, each very different,
florid with details, but motivated by ending in the discomfiture of the
tutor. In the ebb or ambivalent reaction of this passion he and the tutor
got on better.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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