Apologia DiffidentisDalton, O. M. (Ormonde Maddock)
Philosophy
Apologia Diffidentis
Dalton, O. M. (Ormonde Maddock)
Bashfulness
It was during this last monsoon that doubts began to stir within,
interrupting my studies of the systems of Hindu philosophy and my
porings over sacred books. The vague insistence of these misgivings made
me surely aware that even in this eastern paradise all was not well;
but at first I refused to listen, and plunged deep into the maze of the
Vedanta to escape the importunate voice. Yet anxiety came up around me
like a heavy atmosphere; an indescribable sense of disillusion, clinging
as a damp mist, brought its mildew to the soul, until my new heaven was
overcast and my new earth dispeopled of all pleasures. Then one day the
fever struck me down, and of a sudden my mind became an arena in which
memories of earlier life chased one another unceasingly in the round of
a delirious dance. Trivial events impressed themselves on consciousness
with strange precision; objects long forgotten rose before me outlined
in fire--one, a pane of stained glass in Fairford Church, with a lost
soul peering in anguish through the red bars of hell. Each and every
apparition was of the old life; all were emissaries from the forsaken
West summoning me back to my renounced allegiance. When the fever left
me, returning reason slowly brought order amid the welter of confused
ideas, as the ants sorted the grain for distracted Psyche, and for the
first time I considered in the detachment of reminiscence the nature of
my action in leaving England. I sifted the evidence at length as I lay
under the verandah slowly recovering strength; and when at last judgment
was delivered, it took the necessary form of condemnation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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