The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: facts from his grasp, and gave him a strange sense of distance, even
from the material shapes of wall and window by which he was
surrounded. The prospect of the future, now that the strength of his
passion was revealed to him, appalled him.
The marriage would take place in September, she had said; that allowed
him, then, six full months in which to undergo these terrible extremes
of emotion. Six months of torture, and after that the silence of the
grave, the isolation of the insane, the exile of the damned; at best,
a life from which the chief good was knowingly and for ever excluded.
An impartial judge might have assured him that his chief hope of
recovery lay in this mystic temper, which identified a living woman
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