Appendix VIII

 

In Sartor Resartus Carlyle has left what (in Mr Carlyle, my Patient) his psychosomatic biographer, Dr James Halliday, calls 'an amazing description of a psychotic state of mind, largely depressive, but partly schizophrenic'.

      The men and women around me,' writes Carlyle, 'even speaking with me, were but Figures; I had practically forgotten that they were alive, that they were not merely automata.  Friendship was but an incredible tradition.  In the midst of their crowded streets and assemblages I walked solitary; and (except that it was my own heart, not another's, that I kept devouring) savage also as the tiger in the jungle.... To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was once huge, dead immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.... Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it of Man or of the Devil.  And yet, strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear, tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what; it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath, would hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but the boundless jaws of a devouring Monster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured.'  Renée and the idolater of heroes are evidently describing the same experience.  Infinity is apprehended by both, but in the form of 'the System', the 'immeasurable Steam-Engine'.  To both, again, all is significant, but negatively significant, so that every event is utterly pointless, every object intensely unreal, every self-styled human being a clockwork dummy, grotesquely going through the motions of work and play, of loving, hating, thinking, of being eloquent, heroic, saintly, what you will - the robots are nothing if not versatile.