all straight. But I can’t do that either. I can’t stop earning money, I daren’t stop. Even with Emily’s job, even if I get a grant to become a medical student, I can’t stop her allowance, I can’t ask her to suffer more. And I’d hardly ever be able to see her then. Thank God I never told her about the doctor idea. I can’t drive her mad. Besides it would be dangerous. No wonder I’ve never been able to save any money. I’ve given so much time and so much life to something which has turned out so badly. This bloody lie has ruined everything. And now just when I see some really good possibility in my life at last, I can’t have it because of this, because of her. However I shift the pieces about I’m trapped. I can’t afford to be poor. If all this came out it would ruin my practice. Anyway, it can’t come out, it would kill Harriet. I don’t want it to come out. But I don’t want it to go on either. God, there must be some way of sorting it out, there must be some best course. But there isn’t. Anything good is immediately cancelled. Because I feel vile I can’t spur myself to do good. What is good here anyway? It is entirely hidden.
Sometimes, reviewing his dilemma, Blaise felt that the thing he resented most of all was the loss of his virtue. Another man might have called the lost thing his honour. A girl might have called it her innocence. Blaise mourned for his lost goodness. He was condemned to live in a sinful state, although his mind did not consent to sin and rejected it. Reflection about his psychology did not help him at all. Much of the machinery was painfully clear, but irrelevant The agonizing fact was that he could not now be good because he had to go on and on and on acting a bad role, it was as simple as that; even though he so often and so frenziedly felt the role as entirely alien. What an ordinary thuggish homme moyen sensuel he appeared to have turned out to be, and yet of course he was not. His virtue had mattered to him. He had treasured it when he was young. His fellow students thought him ‘wise’, his patients still did. A sense of himself as wise and good had led him into his chosen vocation, had given him the ‘nerve’ required to practise. The same guiding star now, with wonderful clarity, pointed him onward. But he could not go. It was as if his virtue did not know that he had lost it, could follow it no further. It kept on pointing. This was the anguish. And Harriet: she had so perfectly fostered in him that happy sense of being a good man, which sometimes almost forgetting, he seemed still to retain. When had the wickedness started, where was it located? How ever had he managed to put himself into his position of torment?
In fact he had not slipped into it either accidentally or unwillingly. He had rushed into it with cries of joy. This memory was sometimes an agony, sometimes a consolation. Blaise had known ever since boyhood that he had certain peculiarities. They had never troubled him. This exercise of common sense was indeed part of his wisdom, and reflection on his own oddness had also led him to study psychology. He was not all that odd, he early concluded. Most people were pretty odd. It was interesting. He had early discovered, partly by introspection, partly by intuition, partly by questioning others, and partly by a study of literature, that human minds, including the minds of geniuses and saints, are given to the creation of weird and often repulsive fantasies. These fantasies, he coneluded, are in almost every case quite harmless. They live in the mind, like the flora and fauna which live in the bloodstream, and like these may be in some ways beneficial. They are of course symptoms of mental structure, but are not themselves usually causes, except perhaps in art. Fantasy concerning murder may make a man write a book about murder, but is very unlikely to make him commit murder. So, theoretically and by instinct, Blaise lived cheerfully with the oddities of
Sometimes, reviewing his dilemma, Blaise felt that the thing he resented most of all was the loss of his virtue. Another man might have called the lost thing his honour. A girl might have called it her innocence. Blaise mourned for his lost goodness. He was condemned to live in a sinful state, although his mind did not consent to sin and rejected it. Reflection about his psychology did not help him at all. Much of the machinery was painfully clear, but irrelevant The agonizing fact was that he could not now be good because he had to go on and on and on acting a bad role, it was as simple as that; even though he so often and so frenziedly felt the role as entirely alien. What an ordinary thuggish homme moyen sensuel he appeared to have turned out to be, and yet of course he was not. His virtue had mattered to him. He had treasured it when he was young. His fellow students thought him ‘wise’, his patients still did. A sense of himself as wise and good had led him into his chosen vocation, had given him the ‘nerve’ required to practise. The same guiding star now, with wonderful clarity, pointed him onward. But he could not go. It was as if his virtue did not know that he had lost it, could follow it no further. It kept on pointing. This was the anguish. And Harriet: she had so perfectly fostered in him that happy sense of being a good man, which sometimes almost forgetting, he seemed still to retain. When had the wickedness started, where was it located? How ever had he managed to put himself into his position of torment?
In fact he had not slipped into it either accidentally or unwillingly. He had rushed into it with cries of joy. This memory was sometimes an agony, sometimes a consolation. Blaise had known ever since boyhood that he had certain peculiarities. They had never troubled him. This exercise of common sense was indeed part of his wisdom, and reflection on his own oddness had also led him to study psychology. He was not all that odd, he early concluded. Most people were pretty odd. It was interesting. He had early discovered, partly by introspection, partly by intuition, partly by questioning others, and partly by a study of literature, that human minds, including the minds of geniuses and saints, are given to the creation of weird and often repulsive fantasies. These fantasies, he coneluded, are in almost every case quite harmless. They live in the mind, like the flora and fauna which live in the bloodstream, and like these may be in some ways beneficial. They are of course symptoms of mental structure, but are not themselves usually causes, except perhaps in art. Fantasy concerning murder may make a man write a book about murder, but is very unlikely to make him commit murder. So, theoretically and by instinct, Blaise lived cheerfully with the oddities of
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