SO, in those first bad times, the talisman my brother gave me was not enough. He had given me intimacy of the mind, and the voluptuousness of poetry. He had tried to make it seem an honor for me to be different from the others. But I was terribly greedy, like the fisherman’s wife, and I wanted more things. I did not want to be different from the others, except that I wanted all that they had and much more. Besides poetry and intimacy of the mind, I wanted the intimacy of flirtation and gaiety, the voluptuousness of dancing. I wanted to participate in life with as much freedom as they did and make out of it something more thrilling than they could ever imagine. I wanted to know everything, experience everything, I felt a continual hunger and capacity for life. I wanted somehow to get into the heart of things, whatever and wherever that might be.
Yet I remained year after year on the outside, destined, it seemed, always to watch the drama and action in other lives. And after several years of hungry onlooking, and of stupid wanderings and blind seekings, I became somehow at last (blindly and instinctively without knowing what I was doing) a very perfect imitation of a grownup person, one who was noted for a sort of peaceful wise detachment. Because of this apparently contented detachment, and a modest air of superiority, and my secret devotion to the art of writing which kept always intensifying and enlarging my world of imaginary experience, I deceived myself and everybody who knew me into thinking that I knew a great deal about life. And as my contemporaries grew matronly and burdened with family cares my curious, impersonal life seemed to give me an enviable agelessness and liberty.
And when I stumbled upon the idea that it would be a great thing for me to have a house of my own, and when I decided that the kind of a house I wanted and the only kind that would be suitable for me was a very cunning, little house, a sort of fairytale cottage, it must have been because the rebellious arrogant person who in youth had fought for existence inside the prison of my disguise had somehow been silenced and forgotten, had even learned to submit humbly at last, and had tried to make the most of whatever beguiling charm and appeal there might be in accepting and playing the part of a quaint, small, crumpled figure, who, something like a Walter de la Mare character, was ageless and sexless and supernaturally wise.
But the predicament had not been solved. It had merely been ignored and forgotten and left far behind me, an unopened package containing a time bomb. And now, at the composed and quiet age of just past thirty, the huge passion, the greedy enormous dream of youth which, unspent and unrecognized, had caused me such bewilderment and pain and then been somehow put aside and made unimportant, must have demanded room at last, for it knocked aside all my modest notions and took for its scene of action the high square house on an azure bay, and I unsuspectingly obeyed the order. Like someone walking in his sleep, unconsciously and dauntlessly, I think I was still looking for magic. I think I was still looking, although I didn’t know it, for the secret which would transform me and restore me to my true shape.
With all my air of wisdom and knowingness I knew only one thing that was worth anything at all, I knew enough to follow a crucial instinct when it came, even though it contradicted everything that I had been or known before.
In terror and joy I went ahead with my negotiations.