pondering reached its height, as was inevitable, when there arose the
question of choosing a profession and of planning the future rather than
of following a vocation. But as long as this introspection lasted, I had
a torturing feeling that my own eye was watching me, as though I were a
stranger, a feeling of being the spectator of my own actions, the
auditor of my own words, a double personality who must nevertheless one
day become one, should I live long enough. After having, with a friend,
paid a visit to Kaalund, who was prison instructor at Vridsloeselille at
the time and showed us young fellows the prison and the cells, I used to
picture my condition to myself as that of a prisoner enduring the
torture of seeing a watchful eye behind the peep-hole in the door. I had
noticed before, in the Malmoe prison, how the prisoners tried to besmear
this glass, or scratch on it, with a sort of fury, so that it was often
impossible to see through it. My natural inclination was to act naively,
without premeditation, and to put myself wholly into what I was doing.
The cleavage that introspection implies, therefore, was a horror to me;
all bisection, all dualism, was fundamentally repellent to me; and it
was consequently no mere chance that my first appearance as a writer was
made in an attack on a division and duality in life's philosophy, and
that the very title of my first book was a branding and rejection of a
_Dualism_. So that it was only when my self-contemplation, and with
it the inward cleavage, had at length ceased, that I attained to
quietude of mind.


XXI.

Thus violently absorbing though the mental condition here suggested was,
it was not permanent. It was childish and child-like by virtue of my
years; the riper expressions which I here make use of to describe it