AT the very beginning it was lucky for me that I found my brother Warren. Three things had ended suddenly all at the same time—my illness and my childhood and my father’s life. When one thing ends another must begin. As I have already written, at the end of my illness there began my ignorant and lonely struggle to adapt myself to what I had seen in the mirror. At this same time my childhood ended and a thrilling ferment of new consciousness had begun to go on inside me which made me feel myself turning wonderfully into a haughty and grand young lady. Although my body was impeded in its growth and I was bewildered by its misfortune, my mind was not impeded. My mind grew independently of my body and independently of the shape of my body. It grew and behaved at first as if nothing were wrong with me anywhere. I was even more concerned at first with extricating myself from the disgrace of being considered a child than I was concerned with the fearful fact of my deformity. Now that I was up and walking around at last, like the rest of the world, I seemed to feel a fierce revenge against my bed and my invalid life, and especially against the bright little girl who had accepted it all so sweetly and submissively. I suddenly hated my adorable microscopic world, and all the little arts out of which with painstaking care I had constructed my joys. I hated the loving admiration of the grownups for me and everything I did. I felt fierce and rebellious and strong and mad toward them and myself. Something new had come into my mind, and it was like a labor agitator who furiously tries to destroy the docile contentment of workers who have so long adapted themselves to a narrow life that they do not even realize it is narrow. Out of loyalty to the new values that were dawning in me and making me, as I believed, into an entirely new person, I had to do cruel violence to the contented little girl. I had to emphasize my separateness from her in every possible way because the grownups persisted in clinging to her with an absurd devotion and insisting she was me. Whereas I knew with every part of myself that she was not me any more. I was through with her. I was through because a wonderful thing had happened to me. I had found suddenly that I was not frightened any more by the abstract ideas that had frightened the little girl so terribly in her bed. I had begun to fall at first gingerly and then boldly in love with the mystery of the Universe. Instead of wanting to curl my mind up and tuck it away in some cozy little place where it could never think those terrifying thoughts of death and birth and time, my mind suddenly wanted to reach out and embrace fearlessly those mysteries and become a conscious, proud part of them. It seemed to me that I had suddenly grown so tall that my head was among the stars. Relieved, by some miracle, of my cosmic fears, I felt an almost drunken sense of liberation, as if I had been released from a most abject slavery and admitted to the free and fearless aristocracy of the mind.
At this crucial time my father died, and on the day I lost him, after a long illness that had made him grow remote from me, I found my brother Warren. We sat side by side on the piazza of our house on the strange April morning when we became fatherless. We watched the undertakers coming up the steps into the house, and going busily back and forth between the house and their terrible high black carriage. I felt cruelly little sorrow, considering how very deeply my father had cherished and loved me, perhaps because his cultivating love had helped to create the little girl whom I was now intent on destroying. Instead, his death gave me an exultant happiness because it strengthened and intensified my new awareness and adoration of cosmic things. It made me feel mature and experienced and proud because I could see it in the radiance of the new daybreak that was in my mind. Death was another of the great and ordered mysteries of life, and, being so, it could never frighten me any more. In that revelation there was indescribable ecstasy and joy for the young mystic who was beginning to inhabit my mind and look out of my eyes.
Like every fifteen-year-old person, my mind was so new to thought, and I was consequently so naïve, that I examined everything that came before me with the feeling that it was an entirely new phenomenon and had never been examined by anybody before. And when I was struck that morning as we sat on the piazza by the thought that the noble mystery of death ought not to be intruded upon and degraded by these loathsome undertakers—officious, practical, busy little men like black ants running to and fro—I was thrilled and surprised by my own angry resentment. In my experience older people seemed to take everything for granted, and when I found that I did not take the undertakers for granted it also dawned on me that I must be a wild and revolutionary thinker. I thought I had hit upon a point of view that probably nobody else in the world had ever held before. It was a purifying, beautiful, joyous sensation of anger that I felt, and I knew for the first time that I could feel passionately about an idea. Something had blazed in me, and from the blaze I discovered a new element in myself, a combustible something that would always blaze again in defense of the mystery and sacredness in things, and against the queer, blind, blaspheming streak in human nature which instead of adoring, must vulgarize and exploit and insult life.
In my excitement I turned to my brother and burst out with some incoherent exclamation about how I hated the undertakers. To my astonishment he said that he knew how I felt, and that he hated them too. This was the first time that I had ever exchanged anything like an abstract idea with anyone, and I could feel my new self expand still more.
So my brother and I looked at each other that day with curiosity and surprise and each recognized in the other a new and unexpected friend. We had both deserted the two absorbed and happy children we had lately been, and in doing so we had lost each other. It was lucky for me that we met again at that moment, which, for me, would have been intolerably bewildering alone. We were just entering the period which is like a magic forest, into which nobody either older or younger than ourselves could possibly be admitted. We needed to escape from them, from all the others, because our turn had come. It was our precious turn to believe, deluded and untested as we were, that we and our generation were the elect—the only beings on earth whose vision of life was really pure and abstract, a mystic’s vision. We had not yet allowed ourselves to be corrupted by any such despicable things as expediency or money. Our actions and plans were not yet crippled by any of the loathsome timidities and misrepresentations of common sense, or stifled altogether by the paralyzing fears by which children and old people are all degraded. From that time of awakening onward there was a wild enchantment crying and singing in my blood, the enchantment and excitement that come, by rights, with the flowering of the young human body and its short-lived perfection. My youthful singing blood did not seem to know the crazy fact that my body had stumbled against, and never could listen to it and learn it and take it in. My very joyous blood took it for granted that my body was unfolding simultaneously with my consciousness, and the song of my blood was so much a part of me that I forgot, over and over, and took it for granted too.
Over and over I forgot what I had seen in the mirror. It could not penetrate into the interior of my mind and become an integral part of me. I felt as if it had nothing to do with me; it was only a disguise. But it was not the kind of disguise which is put on voluntarily by the person who wears it, and which is intended to confuse other people as to one’s identity. My disguise had been put on me without my consent or knowledge like the ones in fairy tales, and it was I myself who was confused by it, as to my own identity. I looked in the mirror, and was horror-struck because I did not recognize myself. In the place where I was standing, with that persistent romantic elation in me, as if I were a favored fortunate person to whom everything was possible, I saw a stranger, a little, pitiable, hideous figure, and a face that became, as I stared at it, painful and blushing with shame. It was only a disguise, but it was on me, for life. It was there, it was there, it was real. Every one of those encounters was like a blow on the head. They left me dazed and dumb and senseless every time, until slowly and stubbornly my robust persistent illusion of well-being and of personal beauty spread all through me again, and I forgot the irrelevant reality and was all unprepared and vulnerable again.