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Je crains meme qu'au bout d'un certain temps cet isolement ne produise un facheux etat dans mon esprit. Je me plonge dans le travail, le refuge des gens isoles." Shortly after Easter there came an attack of gout, this time in one knee, and Gilbert was naturally disturbed by the conviction that the disease had become more threatening now that it was going up.
Even when it became a favourite with me, for some reason or other I did not dwell upon the isolement part of it, but rather upon the earlier passages. Curiously enough, it was a quotation in Clough's Amours de Voyages which first made me realise that Wordsworth was dealing with isolement.
The condition to which I refer is that which the musician Berlioz called "isolement" the sense of spiritual isolation, which seizes on those who experience it with a poignancy amounting to awe. Wordsworth's Ode to Immortality affords the locus classicus in the way of description: Fallings from us, vanishings, Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realised.
The first thing to be noted about the sense of isolement is that it comes, not in sleeping, but in waking hours, and that, whether truly or not, it brings with it the feeling that it is the result of some external impulse. The best form of explanation, however, is to describe as exactly as I can my own sensations.
It is not a state of spleen, though that may follow later ... spleen is rather the congealing of all these emotions the block of ice. Even when I am calm I feel a little of this 'isolement' on Sundays in summer, when our towns are lifeless, and everyone is in the country; for I know that people are enjoying themselves away from me, and I feel their absence.
Though the sense of isolement has been experienced by me as a little child, as a lad, as a young man, and even up to the age of forty or forty-five, the recollections of my first visitation, which occurred when I could not have been more, at the very most, than six years of age, are very much more vivid and keener-edged than those of the later occasions.
Since it is appropriate to my account of the phenomenon of isolement, I may add a curious passage in Walt Whitman's Specimen Days and Collect, which shows that the poet knew this form of ecstasy: Even for the treatment of the universal, in politics, metaphysics, or anything, sooner or later we come down to our single, solitary soul.
If I understand the argument rightly, they hold that just as in dreams the unconscious self gets possession of one's personality and the consciousness is for a certain time deposed or exiled, the same thing may happen, and does happen in our waking hours. Therefore isolement must not be regarded as anything wonderful or mystic, but merely as a day-dream.
I once amused myself by getting together a large number of descriptions of "isolement" and found that, though they may differ considerably, they have in common the characteristics enumerated by the Ode.
I hope no one will think that in describing my experiences of isolement in my own mind I was exaggerating the importance of the incident. I know that similar waking trances are very common. I also know that modern psychology, or, I should say, certain schools of modern psychology, regard them merely as manifestations or outcrops of the unconscious self.
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