t of the darkness?

And yet in the midst of this unbearable grief, flashes of joy seemed to
sparkle in my mind, now and again, in a way which quite surprised me.
That life was not a stable permanent fixture was itself the sorrowful
tidings which helped to lighten my mind. That we were not prisoners for
ever within a solid stone wall of life was the thought which
unconsciously kept coming uppermost in rushes of gladness. That which I
had held I was made to let go--this was the sense of loss which
distressed me,--but when at the same moment I viewed it from the
standpoint of freedom gained, a great peace fell upon me.

The all-pervading pressure of worldly existence compensates itself by
balancing life against death, and thus it does not crush us. The
terrible weight of an unopposed life force has not to be endured by
man,--this truth came upon me that day as a sudden, wonderful
revelation.

With the loosening of the attraction of the world, the beauty of nature
took on for me a deeper meaning. Death had given me the correct
perspective from which to perceive the world in the fulness of its
beauty, and as I saw the picture of the Universe against the background
of Death I found it entrancing.

At this time I was attacked with a recrudescence of eccentricity in
thought and behaviour. To be called upon to submit to the customs and
fashions of the day, as if they were something soberly and genuinely
real, made me want to laugh. I _could_ not take them seriously. The
burden of stopping to consider what other people might think of me was
completely lifted off my mind. I have been about in fashionable book
shops with a coarse sheet draped round me as my only upper garment, and
a pair of slippers on my bare feet. Through hot and cold and wet I used
to sleep out on the verandah of the third storey. There the stars and I
could gaze at each other, and no time was lost in greeting the dawn.

This phase had nothing to do with any ascetic feeling. It was more like
a holiday spree as the result of discovering the schoolmaster Life with
his cane to be a myth, and thereby being able to shake myself free from
the petty rules of his school. If, on waking one fine morning we were to
find gravitation reduced to only a fraction of itself, would we still
demurely walk along the high road? Would we not rather skip over
many-storied houses for a change, or on encountering the monument take a
flying jump, rather than trouble to walk round it