Between the pretension and the fact, what’s invented and what’s given, stands one’s own tortured soul. Paul Herz had been pretending all these awful years that he was of another order of men. It occurred to him now—as an icicle occurs to a branch, after a cold hard night of endless dripping—that, no, he was not a man of feeling; it occurred to him that if he was anything at all it was a man of duty. And that when his two selves had become confused—one self, one invention—when he had felt it his duty to be feeling, that then his heart had been a stone, and his will, instead of turning out toward action, had remained a presence in his body, a concrete setting for the rock of his heart. It all led to a very heavy sense of self—an actual sensation of these last years—to a weird textual consciousness of what stood between him and others, a weighted-down feeling under the burden of underwear, tie, shirt, jacket, and coat; a sense of the volume of air itself. Nowhere was it worse than in bed with his wife; paradoxically, undressed was worse than dressed, by a long shot.
