She ran through the streets to the appointed spot, she says: "Then I have a vague memory of something long and dark with red eyes... and something very sweet and very bitter all around me at once; and then I seemed sinking into deep green water, and there was a singing in my ears, as I have heard there is to drowning men... then there was a sort of agonizing feeling, as if I were in an earthquake".
Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.
The effect of this energy on the human body is that of time and therefore as fate, i.e. the agonizing feeling that the outcome of events is a result of measures adopted through time reaching a culmination that is beyond human means of control.
Worst of all, as I hear more and more talk about deficit reduction and further layoffs, I have the agonizing feeling that the worst may not be behind us".
But Nix, like Nelson, has also experienced the indescribably agonizing feeling of tasting the good life in the big leagues and then being asked to go back to the minors.
In the dream, I was consumed with guilt, and pretty soon, that agonizing feeling spilled over into my waking hours too.
It was started in 1990 by a group of birth mothers who had suffered through each Mother's Day feeling an agonizing need to recognize that they, too, had mothered a child even if they did not go on to parent it.
For many South Africans, progress continues to be an agonizing tangle of mixed feelings, old wounds still visible, new promise, resentment, a desire for peace and prosperity.
Needless to say, Obama, a bi-racial man, describes an agonizing "punch in the gut" feeling with this revelation.
To hear the two cycles in sequence was to feel an agonizing spiritual shift.
