CHAPTER XV
THE PROGRESS AND RELAXATION OF MY SUBJECTION
I
The memory of last summer is presented to me now as a series of pictures, some brilliant, others vague, others again so uncertain that I cannot be sure how far they are true memories of actual occurrences, and how far they are interwoven with my thoughts and dreams. I have, for instance, a recollection of standing on Deane Hill and looking down over the wide panorama of rural England, through a driving mist of fine rain. This might well be counted among true memories, were it not for the fact that clearly associated with the picture is an image of myself grown to enormous dimensions, a Brocken spectre that threatened the world with titanic gestures of denouncement, and I seem to remember that this figure was saying: “All life runs through my fingers like a handful of dry sand.” And yet the remembrance has not the quality of a dream.
I was, undoubtedly, overwrought at times. There were days when the sight of a book filled me with physical nausea, with contempt for the littleness, the narrow outlook, that seemed to me to characterise every written work. I was fiercely, but quite impotently, eager at such times to demonstrate the futility of all the philosophy ranged on the rough wooden shelves in my gloomy sitting-room. I would walk up and down and gesticulate, struggling, fighting to make clear to myself what a true philosophy should set forth. I felt at such times that all the knowledge I needed for so stupendous a task was present with me in some inexplicable way, was even pressing upon me, but that my brain was so clogged and heavy that not one idea of all that priceless wisdom could be expressed in clear thought. “I have never been taught to think,” I would complain, “I have never perfected the machinery of thought,” and then some dictum thrown out haphazard by the Wonder—his conception of light conversation—would recur to me, and I would realise that however well I had been trained, my limitations would remain, that I was an undeveloped animal, only one stage higher than a totem-fearing savage, a creature of small possibilities, incapable of dealing with great problems.
Once the Wonder said to me, in a rare moment of lucid condescension to my feeble intellect, “You figure space as a void in three dimensions, and time as a line that runs across it, and all other conceptions you relegate to that measure.” He implied that this was a cumbrous machinery which had no relation to reality, and could define nothing. He told me that his idea of force, for example, was a pure abstraction, for which there was no figure in my mental outfit.
Such pronouncements as these left me struggling like a drowning man in deep water. I felt that it must be possible for me to come to the surface, but I could do nothing but flounder; beat fiercely with limbs that were so powerful and yet so utterly useless. I saw that my very metaphors symbolised my feebleness; I had no terms for my own mental condition; I was forced to resort to some inapplicable physical analogy.
These fits of revolt against the limitations of human thought grew more frequent as the summer progressed. Day after day my self-sufficiency and conceit were being crushed out of me. I was always in the society of a boy of seven whom I was forced to regard as immeasurably my intellectual superior. There was no department of useful knowledge in which I could compete with him. Compete indeed! I might as well speak of a third-standard child competing with Macaulay in a general knowledge paper.
“Useful knowledge,” I have written, but the phrase needs definition. I might have taught the Wonder many things, no doubt; the habits of men in great cities, the aspects of foreign countries, or the subtleties of cricket; but when I was with him I felt—and my feelings must have been typical—that such things as these were of no account.