not in
my room. Starting up on my couch, I stared wildly round the strange
apartment.

I think it must have been many seconds that I sat up thus in bed
staring about, without being able to regain the clew to my personal
identity. I was no more able to distinguish myself from pure being
during those moments than we may suppose a soul in the rough to be
before it has received the ear-marks, the individualizing touches which
make it a person. Strange that the sense of this inability should be
such anguish! but so we are constituted. There are no words for the
mental torture I endured during this helpless, eyeless groping for
myself in a boundless void. No other experience of the mind gives
probably anything like the sense of absolute intellectual arrest from
the loss of a mental fulcrum, a starting point of thought, which comes
during such a momentary obscuration of the sense of one's identity. I
trust I may never know what it is again.

I do not know how long this condition had lasted--it seemed an
interminable time--when, like a flash, the recollection of everything
came back to me. I remembered who and where I was, and how I had come
here, and that these scenes as of the life of yesterday which had been
passing before my mind concerned a generation long, long ago mouldered
to dust. Leaping from bed, I stood in the middle of the room clasping
my temples with all my might between my hands to keep them from
bursting. Then I fell prone on the couch, and, burying my face in the
pillow, lay without motion. The reaction which was inevitable, from the
mental elation, the fever of the intellect that had been the first
effect of my tremendous experience, had arrived. The emotional crisis
which had awaited the full realization of my actual position, and all
that it implied, was upon me, and with set teeth and laboring chest,
gripping the bedstead with frenzied strength, I lay there and fought
for my sanity. In my mind, all had broken loose, habits of feeling,
associations of thought, ideas of persons and things, all had dissolved
and lost coherence and were seething together in apparently
irretrievable chaos. There were no rallying points, nothing was left
stable. There only remained the will, and was any human will strong
enough to say to such a weltering sea, "Peace, be still"? I dared not
think. Every effort to reason upon what had befallen me, and realize
what it implied, set up an intolerable swimming of the brain. The idea