Quotation from: The Arrow of Gold

Written by: Joseph Conrad


I would have smiled at my absurdity if all, even the most intimate,
vestige of gaiety had not been crushed out of my heart by the
intolerable weight of my love for Rita. It crushed, it
overshadowed, too, it was immense. If there were any smiles in the
world (which I didn't believe) I could not have seen them. Love
for Rita . . . if it was love, I asked myself despairingly, while I
brushed my hair before a glass. It did not seem to have any sort
of beginning as far as I could remember. A thing the origin of
which you cannot trace cannot be seriously considered. It is an
illusion. Or perhaps mine was a physical state, some sort of
disease akin to melancholia which is a form of insanity? The only
moments of relief I could remember were when she and I would start
squabbling like two passionate infants in a nursery, over anything
under heaven, over a phrase, a word sometimes, in the great light
of the glass rotunda, disregarding the quiet entrances and exits of
the ever-active Rose, in great bursts of voices and peals of
laughter. . . .

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