There are times in life when our affairs are at some high crest, when all emotion and the processes of thought become intensified and crystallised:  the slightest incident makes a deep-bitten impression; the most momentary effect of colour or lighting, or the tones of a voice, remain in the memory indissolubly connected with the phase the mind is passing through.  Every sense is hung upon a hair-trigger, and even irrelevant things touch more sharply than usual, in the same way that a magnifying glass reveals the minutest pores and hairs on the hand holding whatever the primary object to be looked at may be.  They are mercifully few, those periods of intense clarity, for they leave a mind and heart deadened and surfeited, that slowly awake to the dull consciousness of pain, even as the body, numbed by a severe accident, only after a while awakes to sentient aching.  Ishmael passed into this phase in the first days after the scene in the wood, before physically he was conscious of much beyond a dull throbbing in his head.

He lay and stared from out his bandages, feigning more stupor than he felt in his passionate craving to keep off all discussion and inquiry.  He lay and watched the spring sunlight creep over the whitewashed wall opposite, and every slow black fly that crawled across the patch of warmth might have been crawling over his raw nerves.  He almost expected the surface of the wall to contract like a skin and twitch them off, as he felt his own skin doing out of sympathy.

In the night, when the wall was filmed with shadow save for the faint flickering of a rushlight that made great rounds of light upon the dimness, then he saw all his life at Cloom passing in a shadow show across the wall, crawling like the flies....  He was never delirious; physically his fine and sane constitution was recovering well from a nasty blow—­it was merely as though all his mind had been set a little faster, like a newly-regulated clock, a clock set to work backwards; and he could hear its ticking through all the sounds of everyday life that, hushed as much as might be, came into his room.

He felt sick of it all, sick of the striving at Cloom, of the quarrels with Archelaus, of Tom’s cat-like attacks, of his mother’s plaints, of the cruelties he felt spoiling the whole countryside like a leprosy.  He cared for no one near him except Killigrew, because he alone stood for the things of an alien world.  He hated the sound of John-James’ boots that never failed to go a tip-toe over the cobbles below his window.  He wanted nothing, not even to get away from it all.  He was too absorbed watching it upon the wall, hearing his own mind ticking out its comments like that horrible instrument Vassie had upon the piano to time her exercises.

It was the first time since the fit in his childhood, which he did not remember, that he had ever lain helpless or suffered in his body, and he was aware of humiliation.  All he could remember of the scene in the wood showed him his own futility.  Everything was wasted—­nothing he had done was any good nor the doing of it, then or ever again, at all worth while.  Nothing seemed to matter.