There was this much truth, he thought, in the popular belief that all analysts were a little cracked themselves: a good proportion of the people who get all the way through the man-killing course that makes an orthodox analyst—a course in which an M.D. degree is only a beginning—are impelled to do so in the first place by a consuming interest in their own neuroses. Herman, for example, from the age of fifteen up until the completion of his own analysis at twenty-six, had been so claustrophobic that he couldn't force himself into a subway car or an elevator.
But was he now insane?
Can a foot-rule measure itself?
Herman finished. At an appropriate hour he waded ashore, cleaned his catch, cooked it and ate it. Where the ground had been bare around his cooking spot, he saw empty darkness, star-studded, rimmed by a tangled webwork of bare rootlets. He tried to go on looking at it when he had finished eating the fish. He couldn't.
After the meal, he tried to take out his notebook and pen. He couldn't.
In fact, it occurred to him, he was helpless to do anything that he wouldn't normally have done.
Pondering that discovery, after he had cleaned his utensils and finished his other chores, Herman crawled into his tent and went to sleep.
Burying the garbage had been an unsettling experience. Like a lunatic building a machine nobody else can see, he had lifted successive shovels-full of nothing, dropped the empty cans and rubbish ten inches into nothing, and shoveled nothing carefully over them again....
