A year after, Professor Black, assistant professor in English literature, who served on the judging board, told me confidentially of this ... though he declared that he had fought for me, alleging how I needed the money, and how I had honestly won the award.
I thought of the couplet of Gay:
"He who would without malice pass his days
Must live obscure and never merit praise."
Outwardly I maintained a bold and courageous rudeness. Inwardly a panic had swept over me ... not the panic of deep solitude when a man is alone at night in a boundless forest ... I have known that, too, but it is nothing to that which comes to a man who knows all society, by its very structure, arrayed against him and his dreams.
When the ancient Egyptians had finished the building of a pyramid, they began polishing it at the top, proceeding downward. And it has been said that on the finished, hard, smooth exterior even a fly would slip....
Huge, granite, towering, the regularised life appeared to me, the life that bulked on all sides ... I saw that it was the object of education, not to liberate the soul and mind and heart, but to reduce everything to dead and commonplace formulae.
On all sides, so to speak, I saw Christ and Socrates and Shelley valeted by society ... dress suits laid out for them ... carefully pressed and creased ... which,—now dead,—it was pretended their spirits took up and wore ... had, in fact, always worn....