I suffered, I suppose, from
a sort of ennui of the imagination. I found myself without an object to
hold my will together. I sought. I read restlessly and discursively.
I tried Ewart and got no help from him. As I regard it all now in this
retrospect, it seems to me as if in those days of disgust and abandoned
aims I discovered myself for the first time. Before that I had seen only
the world and things in it, had sought them self-forgetful of all but
my impulse. Now I found myself GROUPED with a system of appetites and
satisfactions, with much work to do--and no desire, it seemed, left in
me.
There were moments when I thought of suicide. At times my life appeared
before me in bleak, relentless light, a series of ignorances, crude
blunderings, degradation and cruelty. I had what the old theologians
call a "conviction of sin." I sought salvation--not perhaps in the
formula a Methodist preacher would recognise but salvation nevertheless.
Men find their salvation nowadays in many ways. Names and forms don't, I
think, matter very much; the real need is something that we can hold
and that holds one.
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