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Page 1 of 11929 · PDF PAGE 51
…d, flamed off, free from organic form. Where was Arthur? His brain, his individuality, his life, were utterly de- stroyed. As separate things, yes: Arthur had entered the universal consciousness. And I heard this utterance: or rather this is my translation into English of a single thought whose syn- thesis is Woe. Substance is called spirit or matter. Spirit and matter are one, indivisible, eternal, inde- structible. Infinite and eternal change! Infinite and eternal pain! No absolute: no truth, no beauty, no idea, nothing but the whirlwinds o…
1929 · PDF PAGE 49
…weariness and satiety, even for ever and for evermore. In this inhuman, this praeterdiabolic in- ferno was a wearisome repetition, a harping on the same hateful discord, a continuous nagging whose inter- vals afforded no relief, only a suspense brimming with the anticipation of some fresh terror. For hours which were to him eternities this stage continued as each cell that held the record of a memory underwent the degenerative changes which awoke it into hyperbromic purulence. VIII The minute bacterial corruption now assumed a gross chemistry. …
1929 · PDF PAGE 30
V That my only means of discovering Arthur's thought was by muscle-reading became more than doubtful dur- ing the third year of our marriage. We practised telepa- thy unashamed. We excluded the muscle-reader and the superauditor and the human thermopile by elaborate precautions; yet still I was able to read every thought of his mind. On our holiday in North Wales at Easter one year we separated for a week, at the end of that week he to be on the leeward, I on the windward side of Tryfan, at an appointed hour, he there to open and read t…
1929 · PDF PAGE 48
VII As the putrefaction of the brain advanced, the burst- ing of the pustules occasionally overlapped, with the result that the confusion and exaggeration of madness with all its poignancy was superadded to the simpler hell. One might have thought that any confusion would have been a welcome relief to a lucidity so appalling; but this was not so. The torture was infused with a shat- tering sense of alarm. The images rose up threatening, disappeared only by blasting themselves into the pultaceous coprolite which was, as it were, the main body of…
1929 · PDF PAGE 34
their bowels dragging behind them; creatures half ele- phant, half beetle; things that were but a ghastly blood- shot eye, set about with leathery tentacles; women whose skins heaved and bubbled like boiling sulphur, giving off clouds that condensed into a thousand other shapes, more hideous than their mother; these were the least of the denizens of these hateful rivers. The most were things impossible to name or to describe. I was brought back from the vision by the stertorous and strangling breath of Arthur, who had been seized with a convuls…
1929 · PDF PAGE 31
…istorted by my over- sensitive organization. I said no more; Arthur looked grave. At night he asked abruptly after a long period of brooding, Was that my thought? I could only stammer that I did not know. Incidentally he complained of fa- tigue, and the listlessness, which before had seemed nothing to me, assumed a ghastly shape. There was something in him that was not he! The indifference had appeared transitory; I now became aware of it as con- stant and increasing. I was at this time twenty-three years old. You wonder that I write with suc…
1929 · PDF PAGE 43
… was well, that death had ended all. Woe to humanity! The consciousness of Arthur was more alive than ever. It was the black fear of falling, a dumb ecstasy of changeless fear. There were no waves upon that sea of shame, no troubling of those accursed waters by any thought. There was no hope of any ground to that abyss, no thought that it might stop. So tireless was that fall that even acceleration was absent; it was constant and level as the fall of a star. There was not even a feel- ing of pace; infinitely fast as it must be, judging from the…
1929 · PDF PAGE 19
II. Theodore Bugg, a year later, was paying the price of his fall. He had allowed Gertrude to attend Art Classes, although he knew it to be wrong. But he had grown to fear his daughter, andon such a point especiallyhe was incapable of fighting her. For there were times when he tried to persuade himself that there was nothing wrong in it. A brother church-warden had looked a little askance when the news of Gertrude's advanced ideas had come; but Theodore had stoutly and even a little sternly rebuked him with the original remark: To the pu…
1929 · PDF PAGE 20
And he discharged a groom for whistling on Sunday. But if these expedients salved his conscience, they did nothing to quell Gertrude's incipient tendency to in- dependence of thought and action. There had been a very unpleasant scene when he threw into the fire a book from Mudies (I thought one could have trusted Mudies!) called The Stolen Bacillus, which he under- stood to be of a grossly immoral tendency. (Nasty filth about free love or something, isn't it?) Theodore Bugg was not a sensitive man; excess of intuitive sympathy had not made …
1929 · PDF PAGE 42
…ense. If I am immortal, what is the difference between a long time and a short time? A thousand years and a day are obviously the same thing from the point of view of for ever. There is a subconscious clock in us, a clock wound up by the experience of the race to go for seventy years or so. Five minutes is a very long time to us if we are waiting for an omnibus, an age if we are waiting for a lover, nothing at all if we are pleasantly engaged or sleeping.1 We think of seven years as a long time in connection with penal servitude; as a negligi…
1929 · PDF PAGE 33
… delusions. I mean that the problem of the true Ego took hold of his imagination. One perfect summer night at Contrexéville he was feel- ing much better; the symptoms had (temporarily) disap- peared almost entirely under the treatment of a very skilful doctor at that Spa, a Dr. Barbezieux, a most kind and thoughtful man. I am going to try, said Arthur, to penetrate my- self. Am I an animal, and is the world without a pur- pose? Or am I a soul in a body? Or am I, one and indi- visible in some incredible sense, a spark of the infinite light of…
1929 · PDF PAGE 44
… correspond exactly with a physical condition; it was the reflection in a consciousness from which human limitation had fallen away of things actu- ally taking place in the body. It was a false interpretation perhaps; but it was his interpretation; and it was that which caused suffering so beyond all that poets have ever dreamt of the infernal. I am ashamed to say that my first thought was of the Catholic Church and its masses for the repose of the dead. I went to the Cathedral, revolving as I went all that had ever been saidthe superstitions …
1929 · PDF PAGE 10
…e watched day and night, it would be useless to try to drive a tunnel to the mainland; we have no aeroplanes or balloons, or means of making them. But if we could once reach the waters edge, which we must do in whatever direction we set out if we only keep in a straight line, and if we can find a boat unguarded, and if we can avoid arousing the alarm, then we have merely to cross the sea, and either find a land where we are unknown, or disguise ourselves and our boat and return to Devils Island as shipwrecked mariners. The latter idea would b…