After having, with a friend,
paid a visit to Kaalund, who was prison instructor at Vridsloeselille at
the time and showed us young fellows the prison and the cells, I used to
picture my condition to myself as that of a prisoner enduring the
torture of seeing a watchful eye behind the peep-hole in the door. I had
noticed before, in the Malmoe prison, how the prisoners tried to besmear
this glass, or scratch on it, with a sort of fury, so that it was often
impossible to see through it. My natural inclination was to act naively,
without premeditation, and to put myself wholly into what I was doing.
The cleavage that introspection implies, therefore, was a horror to me;
all bisection, all dualism, was fundamentally repellent to me; and it
was consequently no mere chance that my first appearance as a writer was
made in an attack on a division and duality in life's philosophy, and
that the very title of my first book was a branding and rejection of a
_Dualism_. So that it was only when my self-contemplation, and with
it the inward cleavage, had at length ceased, that I attained to
quietude of mind.
XXI.
Thus violently absorbing though the mental condition here suggested was,
it was not permanent. It was childish and child-like by virtue of my
years; the riper expressions which I here make use of to describe it
always seem on the verge of distorting its character.
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