Bleak retrospective

In Bleak House, our heroine/part-time narrator Esther Summerson catches smallpox. Not that Dickens ever names it; apparently naming diseases in those days was like mentioning the outhouse. (And speaking of names, you know Esther's not going to marry Mr. Guppy, because she's got a more or less realistic name and he's got a joke name. You know that even before you figure out who her parents are.)

Anyway, after Esther sickens:

. . .everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance where there was little or no separation between the various stages of my life . . .I had never known before how short life really was and into how small a space the mind could put it.

I once read of a man who almost drowned escaping from a wrecked submarine, who felt he relived every moment of his life as he struggled up to the surface. Bad enough, though he was only 19. When the body seems to be saying life is ending, the mind for some reason gives it a quick once-over and packs it into a small space.

Another time, I dreamt I'd found out that in Purgatory, we have to undergo this for the life of everyone we've ever known. I was trying to look on the bright side and see it as time travel and figure out how far back it would take me -- the 1880's, I figured, for my great-grandmother's childhood.

Now sometimes I think, it's so sternly fitting, I may just find out someday that it's true.