. . .

The third time he brings the dream-wroth upon himself.

He starves himself. He thirsts himself. He spends four days, which is at least three and a half days too much, roaming the cemetery of the hats. At the end of it he is delirious; chanting songs that make no sense and giggling at shadows, he tumbles suddenly through into a crisp clarity of vision, works in a fury, and when he has done he has not the faintest idea of what it is that he has done, but it has changed him.

After that he does not need such measures any longer.

After that he does not need to suffocate, or drown, or starve himself. He need only wear the hat to produce that pitch of desperate attention, now woven together with rather than actively preceding the joy and the insight it attends.

And now and again he fears he has doomed himself; that the process of refinement he has chosen will reveal itself to be an endless turning-inwards rather than a looking-out. That he is sealing himself with his particular evolution into the world of his own conceptions rather than opening himself to the great vistas that spread beyond — as if the price of perfecting his vision were that he must wear a blindfold; of perfecting his hearing, that he must fill his ears with a dread black jam; as if the price of unfolding his dreams, to better look upon them, would be to bind them all down and deaden them under the weight of his lifeless hat.

Such concepts, he decides, are futile; he does his best to scrub them out.

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