months that I had spent, for all my happiness, in a state of perpetual hunger; and so at the same time I felt it I felt too that my resolution was a lie, that it had always been a lie, that my real life was here, and I thought this even as I struggled to climb from the new depth I had been shown. And even as I climbed or sought to climb I knew that having been shown it I would come back to it, when the pain had faded and the fear, maybe not to this man but to others like him; I would desire it, though I didn’t desire it now, and for a time I would resist my desire but only for a time. There
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