So it came about that, even though these men were then my only companions among the prisoners, as I was compelled by my love of the dead and my wish to obey scripture, I left off attempting to work conversion among the philosophic ones, with the immediate result of their no longer desiring me to come among them. As long as I had been willing to argue against the faith they defended, I had been welcomed as one of their fraternity. But when I determined that by my own faith I must not attack theirs (and by that means also no longer to be forced into glum concessions of making no sense), the philosophic ones no longer found me of interest. This was to become a considerable deprivation for me, for I had learned to value the companionship of the philosophers above all others and for reasons that had nothing to do with the disputation they themselves valued so highly, and when I was no longer able to sit with them at table or in the prison reading rooms or even to play dominoes with them (for when I left off arguing against them, they no longer were able to respect my intelligence), I sat alone in my cell and wondered what they were doing at that moment, what they were saying to each other, what they were analyzing, discussing and evaluating together, for these were men who talked with feeling and intelligence about many of the things that interested me.
I did not complain then, nor do I now, even though I had fallen into a deep solitude that was broken only by the sporadic visits of my wife, who was growing more weakly, and, for a brief period, the occasional conversations I had with Jacob Moon prior to his departure from his post as jailor, which also took place that second summer of my imprisonment, when he assumed the directorship of the Society Of Prisoners. I did not complain of my solitude, first, because there was no one but my wife to hear it and I did not wish to increase her sufferings by a relation of my own, but also because I knew that my solitude had been achieved by me in the service of the dead, and so I saw my sufferings as yet another way to tender mercy to the dead, and this made me glad.
I cannot now say with certainty when it was that I reached this period of my deep solitude, which goes on even to today, except to notice that it occurred sometime long before the death of my beloved wife, which means that it probably took place during the early part of the first eleven years of my imprisonment, for I am told that her death took place only a year ago this last winter. Regardless, my experience of the passage of time for those years had become over the years such that I could recall the most distant parts with great clarity and detail, almost as if they were events of barely a month ago. But as the events came nearer in time to the present moment, I found myself unable to recall them very clearly and sometimes not at all. I do not know for sure why this should be so. It is more usual that the opposite should be the case, that I should remember events of ten and twelve years ago only vaguely and with great gaps of forgotten days, with even months and whole seasons missing, and that I should remember the more recently transpired events of my imprisonment with a more reliable continuity and in much sharper and more plentiful detail.
I have studied this seeming paradox with care, especially in the absence of my coffin, to which ordinarily I would have repaired for meditation and access to a higher intelligence than my own, and I have devised a theory to explain the phenomenon. Here it is. In as much as all my efforts during my imprisonment after the loss of my coffin were bent singlemindedly toward freeing me from being the man of time who moves through tiny segmented cells of experience in time, and in so far as I did succeed in those efforts, by that much would I be freed of the burden and the incriminating stain of memory. And in so far as my success in this undertaking was marked by gradual degrees, so too would my freedom from memory be gradual and relative.
This made sense to me, and on the several occasions when I related my theory to my wife, it made sense to her as well. I had no one else to confirm or deny or even to question the validity of my theory, for, as I have described, my fellow prisoners had removed themselves from my company, setting the kind of precedent which in prison life does not easily get broken, regardless of the regular movement in and out of that society, and when my jailor Jacob Moon had departed from his post, there was no one even among the staff who was willing to associate with me either. According to my wife there were many of our brethren who wished often to visit me in my confinement, but because to do so would bring upon them certain exposure and possible prosecution, they were forced with reluctance to stay away. And even if they had wished to take such a risk, I would not have allowed it, for my best use to them was as an example, not as a companion nor even as an object for their sympathies. Also, as I mentioned, my wife’s cousin Gina, who in the beginning of my imprisonment would visit me frequently, after my having been brought to my senses by the words spoken to me in my dream by my father and his brother, feared that I would only be reminded by her presence of that for which I felt considerable guilt. This I took to be an unintended but precise description of how she herself doubtless felt, and thus I urged my wife to assure her cousin that she need not visit me anymore, that in fact I would consider it unbecoming of her to do so, for I would take it as an indication that she did not herself feel any guilt for the nature of our carnal activities together in those early days of my imprisonment. My wife told me that her cousin accepted this message with her usual placid understanding, and this pleased me and gave me hope that the entire experience had enlarged her spiritual understanding of the nature of carnality and the dead as much as it had my own. But with regard to my theory about the paradoxical way in which my memory had come to function and not to function, almost as if it had come partially to withhold itself, because there was no one against whom I could test it with argument, except my wife, of course, who agreed fully with me on most things of a theoretical nature anyhow, I was not able to be sure that I was not merely constructing an elaborate disguise so as to hide some painful truth from myself. Whenever one is unsure in this way, if he cannot resort to his coffin and there obtain his confirmation or denial, he has little choice, indeed, he is obliged to do nothing else, than to turn to scripture and hope that his confirmation or denial can be obtained there. For as the scriptures themselves say, Certainty eludes him who will not read deeply into the language of the dead. (Craig., xiv, 22.) And truly, there amongst the scriptures did I find confirmation of my theory, concerning my memory’s increasing ability (as I extricated myself from time and came slowly back into the proper and fitting worship of the dead) to withhold itself.
Now this my reader may think odd, for it may seem to him that I was testing and confirming a theory about the gradual loss of memory with scriptures that I had access to only by means of memory (for the possession of scripture in any printed form was strictly illegal, then as now). May it here be pointed out that my memory was not flawed or imperfect with regard to what it described to me, whether of scripture or of the nature of my experience, as much as it was increasingly absent altogether and increasingly, therefore, reported nothing to me of my experience. My memory of scripture, which I had learned when a mere child, was not affected. But whole days went by without leaving a word in my mind’s report to me on myself, then whole weeks, and then months and seasons, until it was no longer my memory that told me how long I had been imprisoned or precisely when particular events had occurred, as much as it was a tattered calendar on the wall of the dining hall or a casual conversation between two prisoners overheard in the exercise yard or a newspaper in the reading room.