549

'Flight from oneself'.  Those men given to intellectual spasms  Byron and Alfred de Musset¹⁵¹ are examples  who are impatient and gloomily inclined towards themselves and in all they do resemble rampaging horses, and who derive from their own works, indeed, only a shortlived fire and joy which almost bursts their veins and then a desolation and sourness made more wintry by the contrast it presents  how should such men endure to remain within themselves! They long to dissolve into something 'outside'; if one is a Christian and is possessed by such a longing one's goal is to be dissolved into God, to 'become wholly at one with him'; if one is Shakespeare one is satisfied only with being dissolved into images of the most passionate life; if one is Byron one longs for action, because action draws us away from ourself even more than do thoughts, feelings or works. And so could all impulse to action perhaps be at bottom flight from oneself?  Pascal would ask. And the proposition might indeed be demonStrated in the case of the supreme examples known to us of the impulse to action: for consider  in the light of the experience of psychiatry, as is only proper  that four of the most active men of all time were epileptics (namely Alexander, Caesar, Mohammed and Napoleon), just as Byron was also subject to this complaint.