To remember that we did know once is not a sign of possession but
a sign of loss; it is like the number of an engraving which is no longer
on its nail, the title of a volume no longer to be found on its shelf.
My mind is the empty frame of a thousand vanished images. Sharpened by
incessant training, it is all culture, but it has retained hardly
anything in its meshes. It is without matter, and is only form. It no
longer has knowledge; it has become method. It is etherealized,
algebraicized. Life has treated it as death treats other minds; it has
already prepared it for a further metamorphosis. Since the age of
sixteen onward I have been able to look at things with the eyes of a
blind man recently operated upon--that is to say, I have been able to
suppress in myself the results of the long education of sight, and to
abolish distances; and now I find myself regarding existence as though
from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, as
it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am _depersonalized_,
detached, cut adrift. Is this madness? No. Madness means the
impossibility of recovering one's normal balance after the mind has thus
played truant among alien forms of being, and followed Dante to
invisible worlds. Madness means incapacity for self-judgment and
self-control.
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