When we stood on
this old wall here in the sunset I seemed to be standing outside myself
in an immense still sphere of past and future. I stood with my feet
upon the Stone Age and saw myself four thousand years away, and all my
distresses as very little incidents in that perspective. Away there in
London the case is altogether different; after three hours or so of
the Committee one concentrates into one little inflamed moment of
personality. There is no past any longer, there is no future, there is
only the rankling dispute. For all those three hours, perhaps, I have
been thinking of just what I had to say, just how I had to say it,
just how I looked while I said it, just how much I was making myself
understood, how I might be misunderstood, how I might be misrepresented,
challenged, denied. One draws in more and more as one is used up. At
last one is reduced to a little, raw, bleeding, desperately fighting,
pin-point of SELF.... One goes back to one's home unable to recover.
Fighting it over again. All night sometimes.... I get up and walk about
the room and curse.... Martineau, how is one to get the Avebury frame of
mind to Westminster?"
"When Westminster is as dead as Avebury," said the doctor, unhelpfully.
He added after some seconds, "Milton knew of these troubles.
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