As I grew older I became more and more afraid of being either alone or unoccupied. I found that my leisured moments were invaded by a strange uneasiness and bleakness. Particularly I could not bear to be alone during the hours of mid-afternoon, for this period seemed to acquire its own bleak, masterful intent which lived itself out quite apart from me. I could no longer hear the wind rising (a sound I had always loved) without feeling unbearably sad because now my spirit seemed to be incapable of response. And the sound of a cockcrow, even in bright daylight, always gave me the feeling that I was groping in a crepuscular sleep gripped by a horror for which there was never a name.
At the time, of course, I did not understand this sabotage in the invisible dimensions of my being. That came about only many years later. So I became a sufferer denied even the comfort of knowing the name of his disease; and that feeling of uncertainty promptly planted its own colony of uneasiness on the mainland of my spirit. I became, if you like, a haunted person. Yes, I know the meaning of ghosts. And we who discount them do so only because we look for them in the wrong dimension. We think of them as a return of the bodily dead from their graves. But these dead have no need to return to life for they are not the dead. As I see it what has once given life to the spirit can never again be dead in the dimension of the spirit. So we mistake the shadow for the substance; confuse the reflection and the reality. Ghosts do not follow physical death, but rather they precede life. The only death the spirit recognizes is the denial of birth to that which strives to be born: those realities in ourselves that we have not allowed to live. The real ghost is a strange, persistent beggar at a narrow door asking to be born; asking, again and again, for admission at the gateway of our lives. Such ghosts I had, and thus, beyond all reason, I continued to be haunted.
It made no difference that I worked hard, that I took good care never to be idle and seldom alone, that I did my duty conscientiously wherever I saw it clearly, that I earned the envy and esteem of my fellow-men in almost equal measure, that I took my vacations regularly in good company by the sea. . . . This subtle chill of ‘nothingness’, of a cold, phantom presence silently trying and re-trying the handle of my door, turned the warmth of my ardent living tepid. Yet for many years I doubt if any of my contemporaries suspected that anything was wrong with me. Occasionally a woman would catch me out. In the midst of some cheerful gathering she would ask with curious urgency: ‘What’s happened? You look as if something awful had happened?’ I would laugh off the question, for how could I explain that I myself had no inkling of the truth and that in the past, when I had tried to track down the answer, it had led only to a jumble of unrelated visions.
It was only the forward thrust of youth in me and the support, visible and invisible, which the approval and expectation of our community gave me which enabled me to carry on, without wavering, until I was thirty-two. Then, for the first time, I was not merely saddened but frightened. The spirit of play declined in me. I began to be increasingly worried that what I had achieved was without meaning and my success merely an illusion. I would find myself waking up in the small hours of the morning not knowing where I was or who I was. I would appear in court or attend a public function with the feeling that I was not really there at all. I would look at the church clock and think: ‘But that’s not my time at all; that’s not the hour I keep.’ Or glance at the weathercock swinging complacently on its perilous perch and long to cry: ‘For God’s sake teach your kind to be as silent as you are.’
For the first time too the world around me began to indicate that it might have misgivings. One day an old acquaintance buttonholed me in the club to say with flattering solicitude: ‘You know, young fellow-me-lad, we all think you’re overdoing things a bit. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy! Why not come up north with me and put in a month’s shooting on my ranch?’
I could only protest and decline with polite gratitude. Impossible to explain that for years now I had shot only from necessity, for, if there was one thing more than another which made my life seem like the endless repetition of a meaningless pattern, it was this automatic yearly recurrence of a long shooting excursion up north.
Later one or two elderly women, interested in my welfare, began to urge me to marry. ‘You’re not looking after yourself properly. You need someone to take care of you.’ And then, with a touch of archness, ‘Don’t leave it too long!’ I forced a laugh at their concern and said that as soon as I met the right person I wouldn’t hesitate. But on these occasions the question which always rose immediately to the surface of my mind was: ‘How take on somebody else when I can’t even know myself?’
Yes, the paradox which more than any other disturbed my nights was just that: my familiar self was a stranger to me, and the more deeply I felt this the less inclined I was to visit my home. While my parents were still alive I went occasionally to visit them though always with reluctance. When they died I sold the home in the village where I was born and only once went to stay with my brother on the farm which he had inherited. Of that night I remember clearly only one incident. One evening, after a dinner party, I asked my brother to sing for us. Before he could reply the girl he was to marry said with surprise ‘But didn’t you know, Cousin, he never sings any more.’ The answer went deep into me like a knife-stab in the dark.