th my wife had become so
brief and so rarely solitary, that I had no opportunity of perceiving
these images in her mind with more definiteness. The recollections of
the past become contracted in the rapidity of thought till they sometimes
bear hardly a more distinct resemblance to the external reality than the
forms of an oriental alphabet to the objects that suggested them.

Besides, for the last year or more a modification had been going forward
in my mental condition, and was growing more and more marked. My insight
into the minds of those around me was becoming dimmer and more fitful,
and the ideas that crowded my double consciousness became less and less
dependent on any personal contact. All that was personal in me seemed to
be suffering a gradual death, so that I was losing the organ through
which the personal agitations and projects of others could affect me. But
along with this relief from wearisome insight, there was a new
development of what I concluded--as I have since found rightly--to be a
provision of external scenes. It was as if the relation between me and
my fellow-men was more and more deadened, and my relation to what we call
the inanimate was quickened into new life. The more I lived apart from
society, and in proportion as my wretchedness subsided from the violent
throb of agonized passion into the dulness of habitual pain, the more
frequent and vivid became such visions as that I had had of Prague--of
strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies
with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks
flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the
midst of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on
me in all these mighty shapes--the presence of something unknown and
pitiless. For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within
me: to the utterly miserable--the unloving and the unloved--there is no
religion possible, no worship but a worship of devils. And beyond all
these, and continually recurring, was the vision of my death--the pangs,
the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at in
vain.

Things were in this state near the end of the seventh year. I had become
entirely free from insight, from my abnormal cognizance of any other
consciousness than my own, and instead of intruding involuntarily into
the world of other minds, was living continually in my own solitary
future.