By the evening I had ignominiously broken down, and was plunged in the
depths of an exasperated pessimism too deep even for tears, and would
have believed myself the meanest and most miserable of mankind, but that
everybody else, without exception, was even meaner and miserabler
than myself.
They could still eat and drink and be merry. I could not, and did not
even want to.
* * * * *
And so on, day after day, week after week, for months and years....
Thus I grew weary in time of my palling individuality, ever the same
through all these uncontrollable variations of mood.
Oh, that alternate ebb and flow of the spirits! It is a disease, and,
what is most distressing, it is no real change; it is more sickeningly
monotonous than absolute stagnation itself. And from that dreary seesaw
I could never escape, except through the gates of dreamless sleep, the
death in life; for even in our dreams we are still ourselves. There
was no rest!
I loathed the very sight of myself in the shop-windows as I went by; and
yet I always looked for it there, in the forlorn hope of at least
finding some alteration, even for the worse. I passionately longed to be
somebody else; and yet I never met anybody else I could have borne to be
for a moment.
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