alice-james

The fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me_since the hideous summer of _78, when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace.

In looking back now, I see how it began in my childhood, altho_ I was not conscious of the necessity until _67 or _68 when I broke down first, acutely, and had violent turns of hysteria. As I lay prostrate after the storm with my mind luminous and active and susceptible of the clearest, strongest impressions, I saw so distinctly that it was a fight simply between my body and my will, a battle in which the former was to be triumphant to the end....So, with the rest, you abandon the pit of your stomach, the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, and refuse to keep them sane when you find in turn one moral impression after another producing despair in the one, terror in the others, anxiety in the third and so on until life becomes one long flight from remote suggestion and complicated eluding of the multifold traps set for your undoing.