Page 120 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

loss, the rules of life which he had drawn about himself fell
into desuetude.
How foolish his aim had been! He had tried to build a
break-water of order and elegance against the sordid tide
of life without him and to dam up, by rules of conduct and
active interest and new filial relations, the powerful recur-
rence of the tides within him. Useless. From without as
from within the waters had flowed over his barriers: their
tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled
mole.
He saw clearly too his own futile isolation. He had not
gone one step nearer the lives he had sought to approach
nor bridged the restless shame and rancour that had divid-
ed him from mother and brother and sister. He felt that he
was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them
rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and
fosterbrother.
He turned to appease the fierce longings of his heart be-
fore which everything else was idle and alien. He cared little
that he was in mortal sin, that his life had grown to be a
tissue of subterfuge and falsehood. Beside the savage de-
sire within him to realize the enormities which he brooded
on nothing was sacred. He bore cynically with the shame-
ful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to defile
with patience whatever image had attracted his eyes. By day
and by night he moved among distorted images of the outer
world. A figure that had seemed to him by day demure and
innocent came towards him by night through the winding
darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a lecherous cun-

120 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man