2

I WAS coming very close to my own island when I reached the quiet refined age of just past thirty. And by that time I had lost all interest in the little mark in my hand as a promise of adventure or change for me. By that time change was the thing I wanted least of all. I had suffered an unbearable thirst and hunger for experience, and I had been caught and held by my predicament in such a way that I could not seek what I needed and it could not come to me. Therefore at last I turned my back on myself and my predicament in the hope of turning my back on any more unbearable disappointment and despair.

I decided that I would be a writer, and I determined to be the kind of writer, like Flaubert, who removes everything from his life except his writing in order that his writing may live and he may live in it. I even killed in myself any desire that writing should bring me success or fame. I would never risk again any sort of disappointment. Personal obscurity and infinite patience and infinite devotion were to be my program. I knew very well that out of these I could build and maintain a delight as intense as the mystic delight of any nun who has renounced the world.

And so I combined an absolutely uneventful outward personal life with a vivid life of imaginary experience. I filled notebook after notebook with ideas for stories and things in Nature I had noticed and adored, and all kinds of things, minute and spectacular, that I saw happening in other people’s lives. As they grew, my notebooks became as secretly precious to me as their slowly growing honeycomb must be to a hive of bees. And I adored, idolized even, the piece of work which was always in progress—the one whole imaginary experience in the form of a novel or a long short story, which was always in the process of unfolding before the intensely fascinated gaze of my mind’s eye. This mysteriously organic growing thing held the essence of life for me, as I concentrated upon it all the skill I had and all my love. I clung to it the way a bee clings to a flower, clutching at it with my whole body and mind, absorbing it and being absorbed by it as though I would die if I let go. And it seemed as if I would die, if I lost it or lost my power to cling to it. When I was separated from it for a few days, or sometimes even for a single day, my life became an abyss which terrified me, an unfamiliar place where I had a sense of never being at home, of never really belonging there. Because of this queer unnatural suffering, I feared and dreaded any external change which might threaten to prevent me from clinging tight to my great anesthetizing flower of dreams. And when I began to entertain at first mildly and then eagerly the innocent idea that it would be very nice to have a house of my own it was mainly for the sake, I thought, of making this secret life of mine safer still from external interference. I was intending to make it very hard indeed for anything to dislodge or disturb me.