My wife and Jake attempted to calm me and tried valiantly to purge me of guilt by asserting that I was not responsible for their participation, and for a brief period I was sufficiently weak and spiritless (in will, for my appetites were extremely strong) to believe them, so that I was then of a mind that the only weakness I was contending with, the only one I had to feel guilty for, was my own, a vain fantasy, I now realize, but one that I clung to during those horrible months with the desperation of a man drowning in a sea of overpowering desire. During this period I turned with embarrassment away from prayer and scripture, and also I gradually gave up attempting to explain the ethics and metaphysics of my faith, upon which I heretofore had expended great energy, time and ingenuity in conversation with my wife and, now and again when she accompanied my wife, her cousin Gina.
I cannot blame any of these three good people for having joined me in my debauch. I blame only myself, for clearly, if I had not permitted it, if I had not given myself over with such foolish abandon to the physical pleasures offered by my wife’s body, if I had not permitted Jake that afternoon to enter my cell but had instead reacted with proper horror and self-loathing at his proposal, and if the following week I had not permitted Gina to give herself over to Jake’s demands, and then later had not allowed myself to answer her wild cries for satisfaction or my wife’s child-like demands for equal attention from Jake, if at the beginning or at any point along this long, satiny, declining path I had stood up and had said, No! and in that humble way had begun again to turn my attention back to the dead, then none of it would have occurred. I here publicly admit my failure and in this way offer to the dead what meager mercy and remembrance I am capable, in such a fallen state, of offering.
My strength did eventually, though only partially, come back to me, yet it came suddenly, like a room filling with darkness when a candle is extinguished. It came back to me in full force much later, however, and only on the day when I finally obtained my coffin again, an event of great magnitude, coming as it did after such sustained desolation. And then once again would it be proved to me that solely by the careful and proper observation of rite and ceremony and the methodical, informed use of artifact may the mind of the living be permitted the transcendent experience of contemplation of the dead, which in turn is the only way to obtain a proper understanding of the meaning of life. All other means, despite the best of intentions, are but approximate and ultimately misleading. And innocence leads nowhere at all. (The Book of Discipline, viii, 23–25.)
How it came to pass that I obtained a new coffin will be described near the end of this testament. In the meantime, let the reader imagine me, in the descriptions to follow immediately, as daily, usually in the afternoons, engaging in the awful practices and depravities I have described above, while during the mornings and evenings I passed my time in peaceful argument with my jailor (for we had become brothers of a sort and an exchange of views between us was a natural extension of our new affiliation) and also with diverse other prisoners who were of a religious turn of mind but who were not of my faith. For my purpose now is to reveal how the mind of the fallen man, the man who has allowed his attention to wander off the dead and fix itself onto the living only, swiftly divides itself into segments, boxes of thought, attitude and activity with no necessary or discernible link, consistency or communication between them, resulting inevitably in that pathetic and sorrowful figure, the man of time.
THE man of time is without self-unity. I was now such a man. Every day early in the day, I hailed my jailor Jacob Moon in his office at the bottom of the stone staircase that spined the prison, and upon first catching sight of his grim and wholly pragmatic face, the face of a man who had long ago made of himself a tool to fit what he regarded as the job of life, I instantly arranged my own face into a matching mask, and because he never signalled with a wave or other such greeting gesture, neither would I make any gesture. After I had initially hailed him with the sober utterance of his name, Jacob, I merely entered his office and leaned against the jambs, like a wrench or sledge hammer laid there by a workman, and we commenced to speak, drily and without feeling, of economic and political affairs in foreign lands or the difficulties encountered by certain civil engineering projects or the desirability of a central heating system for the prison.
Gone from me now the glorious, unifying vision that had come to me with my faith when I was but a boy. Gone from me now the work of my calling, which was to make coffins. Gone from me the ways of being used in a process larger than that of my own decaying body’s, gone from me the affectionate need of the community. Gone from me now even the need of my brethren in the faith, for not enough of them had followed to where I had been led, and then only a few had known, until this account, my reasons for having forsaken death and clung to imprisonment. And gone from me the urgent presence of my five children, their wonderings, their desires and needs that the incomprehensible be made comprehensible. And now, now, gone the cleaving presence and trust of my wife, for she more than any other person, except for me myself, knew now of my weakness and the state to which I had fallen. And finally, of greatest significance, gone from me the dead, gone timelessness, gone its continuous flow of wisdom, gone its absolute clarity. Gone from me now was I myself, and all that remained were the hard bright surfaces of a self that generated no light but merely reflected back whatever surfaces it met. For once a man loses his connection with whatever looms forever larger than himself, he has lost himself as well. He exists solely as a nexus after that, a mere contingency, a crossroads without a place name.
So it began to appear to me that I was utterly dependent upon the nature and character of whomever I met, before I could reveal any particular nature or character of my own. Unless I could locate clues and hints as to the forms a person used to present himself and deal with other people, which clues and hints would lead me to design appropriate forms for me to present myself back to him, then I trembled all over my body, I whimpered and spoke with an uncontrollable stammer, I fairly well wept with terror. For I had become the man of time. I had lost myself, and lost, I moved in a found world, a very real place that was stuffed to brimming with very real and threatening human beings, animals, plants, powerful objects of all possible descriptions. Nothing there was then that did not fill me with terror and confusion. Though you are seen, you cannot see, and though you are heard, you cannot hear, and though others will walk along with you, you may not walk along with them. For such is the punishment made for the man who has exchanged what is absent for what he cannot avoid. (The Book of Discipline, iii, 30–31.)
Every day I left my cell at dawn, and affecting gaiety, strolled to the dining hall, there to sit among my fellow prisoners and exchange views and idle thoughts while eating our usual breakfast of bread and porridge. To be sure, my stance and affect were those of a game man, a courageous fellow full of wit and intelligence, yet all the while I trembled inside, all the while I guessed and hoped and tried on faces and phrases rapidly, one after the other, eagerly awaiting the click of recognition in the eyes of the man sitting at table across from me or the sleepy eyes of the bland steward handing me my meager meal across the counter or the eyes of the guard at the door as I passed out of the dining hall to the corridor and, desperate for confirmation, found myself rushing down the stairs to the office of the man I tried to think of as my brother, for he was a man I had come to know solely by means of and in the terms of my fall from faith, and it had come to me in my moral confusion of that period that if I could love my jailor, I could perhaps learn to love myself, or what at that time claimed to be myself.