All 3 Uses of
oblivion
in
The Mill on the Floss
- Whenever his mind was wandering in the far past, he fell into this oblivion of their actual faces; they were not those of the lad and the little wench who belonged to that past.†
Chpt 3.8 *
- …these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhone oppress me with the feeling that human life—very much of it—is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers.†
Chpt 4.1
- Behind all the delicious visions of these last hours, which had flowed over her like a soft stream, and made her entirely passive, there was the dim consciousness that the condition was a transient one, and that the morrow must bring back the old life of struggle; that there were thoughts which would presently avenge themselves for this oblivion.†
Chpt 6.13
Definition:
-
(oblivion) the state of being completely forgotten
or:
the state of being completely destroyed -- typically so as to no longer exist
or:
a state of having lost all sense of what is going on -- as during sleep or use of some drugs