“You know, Fielding,” he said at last, “we just don’t know what people are like, we can never tell; there isn’t any truth about human beings, no formula that meets each one of us. And there are some of us—aren’t there?—who are nothing, who are so labile that we astound ourselves; we’re the chameleons. I read a story once about a poet who bathed himself in cold fountains so that he could recognise his own existence in the contrast. He had to reassure himself, you see, like a child being hateful to its parents. You might say he had to make the sun shine on him so that he could see his shadow and
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