5b

During his walks his grief, his bitterness, indeed almost all aspects of his malaise became submerged beneath a welter of mundane, but nonetheless distracting, stimuli. Trite as it seemed, there was a sense in which escape of a metaphysical kind could be linked to, might almost be said to derive from, a fleeting awareness of physical freedom. Impending pain was rendered briefly unbelievable, or at any rate unlikely.

All blinkered men-beasts sometimes feel themselves consoled by such delusions, for to think of self is to be capable of, indeed prefigured for, deceit.