My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness, in plain terms philology: I was redeemed from the ‘book’, for years at a time I read nothing – the greatest favour I have ever done myself! – That deepest self, as it were buried and grown silent under a constant compulsion to listen to other selves (– and that is what reading means!) awoke slowly, timidly, doubtfully – but at length it spoke again. I have never been so happy with myself as in the sickest and most painful periods of my life: one has only to look at ‘Daybreak’ or perhaps the ‘Wanderer and his Shadow’ to grasp what this ‘return to
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