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There exists an old rule—so old and trite that I blush to mention it. Let me twist it into a jingle—to stylize the staleness:

I am speaking of serious novels, naturally. In so-called Planchette-Fiction the unruffled narrator, after describing his own dissolution, can continue thus: “I found myself standing on a staircase of onyx before a great gate of gold in a crowd of other bald-headed angels …”

Cartoon stuff, folklore rubbish, hilarious atavistic respect for precious minerals!

And yet—

And yet I feel that during three weeks of general paresis (if that is what it was) I have gained some experience; that when my night really comes I shall not be totally unprepared. Problems of identity have been, if not settled, at least set. Artistic insights have been granted. I was allowed to take my palette with me to very remote reaches of dim and dubious being.

Speed! If I could have given my definition of death to the stunned fisherman, to the mower who stopped wiping his scythe with a handful of grass, to the cyclist embracing in terror a willow sapling on one green bank and actually getting up to the top of a taller tree on the opposite side with his machine and girlfriend, to the black horses gaping at me like people with trick dentures all through my strange skimming progress, I would have cried one word: Speed! Not that those rural witnesses ever existed. My impression of prodigious, inexplicable, and to tell the truth rather silly and degrading speed (death is silly, death is degrading) would have been conveyed to a perfect void, without one fisherman tearing by, without one blade of grass bloodied by his catch, without any reference mark altogether. Imagine me, an old gentleman, a distinguished author, gliding rapidly on my back, in the wake of my outstretched dead feet, first through that gap in the granite, then over a pinewood, then along misty water meadows, and then simply between marges of mist, on and on, imagine that sight!

Madness had been lying in wait for me behind this or that alder or boulder since infancy. I got used by degrees to feeling the sepia stare of those watchful eyes as they moved smoothly along the line of my passage. Yet I have known madness not only in the guise of an evil shadow. I have seen it also as a flash of delight so rich and shattering that the very absence of an immediate object on which it might settle was to me a form of escape.

For practical purposes, such as keeping body-mind and mind-body in a state of ordinary balance, so as not to imperil one’s life or become a burden to friends or governments, I preferred the latent variety, the awfulness of that watchful thing that meant at best the stab of neuralgia, the distress of insomnia, the battle with inanimate things which have never disguised their hatred of me (the runaway button which condescends to be located, the paper clip, a thievish slave, not content to hold a couple of humdrum letters, but managing to catch a precious leaf from another batch), and at worst a sudden spasm of space as when the visit to one’s dentist turns into a burlesque party. I preferred the muddle of such attacks to the motley of madness which, after pretending to adorn my existence with special forms of inspiration, mental ecstasy, and so forth, would stop dancing and flitting around me and would pounce upon me, and cripple me, and for all I know destroy me.