i want to give you as clearly as i can some impression of the mental states that followed this passion and this collapse. it seems to me one of the most extraordinary aspects of all that literature of speculative attack which is called psychology, that there is no name and no description at all of most of the mental states that make up life. psychology, like sociology, is still largely in the scholastic stage, it is ignorant and intellectual, a happy refuge for the lazy industry of pedants; instead of experience and accurate description and analysis it begins with the rash assumption of elements and starts out upon ridiculous syntheses. who with a sick soul would dream of going to a psychologist?...

now here was i with a mind sore and inflamed. i did not clearly understand what had happened to me. i had blundered, offended, entangled myself; and i had no more conception than a beast in a bog what it was had got me, or the method or even the need of escape. the desires and passionate excitements, the anger and stress and strain and suspicion of the last few months had worn deep grooves in my brain, channels without end or issue, out of which it seemed impossible to keep my thoughts. i had done dishonorable things, told lies, abused the confidence of a friend. i kept wrestling with these intolerable facts. if some momentary distraction released me for a time, back i would fall presently before i knew what was happening, and find myself scheming once more to reverse the accomplished, or eloquently restating things already intolerably overdiscussed in my mind, justifying the unjustifiable or avenging defeat. i would dream again and again of some tremendous appeal to mary, some violent return and attack upon the situation....

one very great factor in my mental and moral distress was the uncertain values of nearly every aspect of the case. there is an invincible sense of wild rightness about passionate love that no reasoning and no training will ever altogether repudiate; i had a persuasion that out of that i would presently extract a magic to excuse my deceits and treacheries and assuage my smarting shame. and round these deep central preoccupations were others of acute exasperation and hatred towards secondary people. there had been interventions, judgments upon insufficient evidence, comments, and often quite justifiable comments, that had filled me with an extraordinary savagery of resentment.

i had a persuasion, illogical but invincible, that i was still entitled to all the respect due to a man of unblemished honor. i clung fiercely to the idea that to do dishonorable things isn't necessarily to be dishonorable.... this state of mind i am describing is, i am convinced, the state of every man who has involved himself in any affair at once questionable and passionate. he seems free, but he is not free; he is the slave of the relentless paradox of his position.

and we were all of us more or less in deep grooves we had made for ourselves, philip, guy, justin, the friends involved, and all in the measure of our grooves incapable of tolerance or sympathetic realization. even when we slept, the clenched fist of the attitudes we had assumed gave a direction to our dreams.

you see the same string of events that had produced all this system of intense preoccupations had also severed me from the possible resumption of those wider interests out of which our intrigue had taken me. i had had to leave england and all the political beginnings i had been planning, and to return to those projects now, those now impossible projects, was to fall back promptly into hopeless exasperation....

and then the longing, the longing that is like a physical pain, that hunger of the heart for some one intolerably dear! the desire for a voice! the arrested habit of phrasing one's thoughts for a hearer who will listen in peace no more! from that lonely distress even rage, even the concoction of insult and conflict, was a refuge. from that pitiless travail of emptiness i was ready to turn desperately to any offer of excitement and distraction.

from all those things i was to escape at last unhelped, but i want you to understand particularly these phases through which i passed; it falls to many and it may fall to you to pass through such a period of darkness and malign obsession. make the groove only a little deeper, a little more unclimbable, make the temperament a little less sanguine, and suicide stares you in the face. and things worse than suicide, that suicide of self-respect which turns men to drugs and inflammatory vices and the utmost outrageous defiance of the dreaming noble self that has been so despitefully used. into these same inky pools i have dipped my feet, where other men have drowned. i understand why they drown. and my taste of misdeed and resentment has given me just an inkling of what men must feel who go to prison. i know what it is to quarrel with a world.