Of course I have vastly oversimplified the process in my telling of it. While it was at work in me I was but dimly aware of it. It is only now, as I look back upon those years, that I can see in true perspective the meaning of what was happening to me then. For human nature is, alas, a muddy pool, too full of sediment, too murky with the deposits of time, too churned up by uncharted currents in the depths and on the surface, to reflect a sharp, precise, and wholly faithful image. For that, one has to wait until the waters settle down, It follows, then, that one can never hope, however much he wishes that he could, to shed the old integuments of the soul as easily and completely as a snake sloughs off its outworn skin.
For, even at the time when this new vision of the outer world was filtering in and making its strange forms manifest to me, I was also more involved than I had ever been before with my inner struggle. Those were the years of the greatest doubt and desperation I had ever known. I was wrestling with the problems of my second book, and I could take in what my eyes beheld only in brief glimpses, flashes, snatches, fragments. As I was later to discover, the vision etched itself upon some sensitive film within, but it was not until that later time, when the second book was finished and out of the way, that I saw it whole and knew what the total experience had done to me.
And all the while, of course, I was still enamoured of that fair Medusa, Fame. My desire for her was a relic of the past. All the guises of Fame’s loveliness—phantasmal, ghostwise, like something flitting in a wood—I had dreamed of since my early youth, until her image and the image of the loved one had a thousand times been merged together. I had always wanted to be loved and to be famous. Now I had known Love, but Fame was still elusive. So in the writing of my second book I courted her.
Then, for the first time, I saw her. I met Mr. Lloyd McHarg. That curious experience should have taught me something. And in a way I suppose it did. For in Lloyd McHarg I met a truly great and honest man who had aspired to Fame and won her, and I saw that it had been an empty victory. He had her more completely than I could ever hope to have her, yet it was apparent that, for him, Fame was not enough. He needed something more, and he had not found it.
I say I should have learned from that. And yet, how could I? Does one ever really learn from others till one is ready for the lesson? One may read the truth in another’s life and see it plain and still not make the application to oneself. Does not one’s glorious sense of “I”—this wonderful, unique “I” that never was before since time began and never will be again hereafter—does not this “I” of tender favour come before the eye of judgment and always plead exception. I thought: “Yes, I see how it is with Lloyd McHarg, but with me it will be different—because I am I.” That is how it has always been with me. I could never learn anything except the hard way. I must experience it for myself before I knew.
So with Fame. In the end I had to have her. She was another woman—of all Love’s rivals, as I was to find by a strange paradox, the only one by women and by Love beloved. And I had her, as she may be had—only to discover that Fame, like Love, was not enough.
By then life’s weather had soaked in, although I was not fully conscious yet what seepings had begun, or where, in what directions, the channel of my life was flowing. All I knew was that I was exhausted from my labour, respiring from the race, conscious only, as is a spent runner, that the race was over, the tape breasted, and that in such measure I had won. This was the only thought within me at the time: the knowledge that I had met the ordeal a second time and at last had conquered—conquered my desperation and self-doubt, the fear that I might never come again to a whole and final accomplishment.
Then the circle went full swing, the cycle drew to its full close. For several months, emptied, hollow, worn out, my life marked time while my exhausted spirit drew its breath. But after a while the world came in again, upon the flood tide of reviving energy. The world came in, the world kept coming in, and there was something in the world, and in my heart, that I had not known was there.