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I AM no longer alone!
How many of you who read understand what that means? How can I best describe the transition from what I was to what I am?
Most people, no doubt, have experienced those inexplicable periods of mental distress when one becomes singularly detached, cut off from sympathetic communion with his fellows, as it were; an unreasonable despondency which makes one feel like an isolated element of humanity meandering through a part at the whim of a fate that for the time being has no particular plan for him or definite excuse for his existence.
It is as if one were an extra unit in current activities, a being not included in life's normal scheme of things.
Imagine, then, a man who has spent over a third of a lifetime continuously in such a woful state.
I, Amos Redfield, M. D., have had a colorless albino soul for twenty-nine years. Let me hasten to state that this unhappy condition did not arise from any fault which I was in a position to correct. Looking back over that dreary twenty-nine years of my life, which should have been the gold of my youth, I feel here obliged to pay tribute to the Amos Redfield that went before—the patient, deep-suffering Amos Redfield who bore it all without bitterness or outward show of complaint and who thus made it possible for me to step into this new existence clean of body and unsoured of mind.
I have not been a voluntary recluse, nor an esthete with dreams beyond the ken of my fellows. Neither have I been one of those individuals who claim they are misunderstood by the world. I could scarcely have been classed as eccentric; indeed I would have been happy to have enjoyed the independence of mind possessed by genius and the so-called crank.
As nearly as I can express it with definite clarity I was a nobody, a man with all the normal gifts of physique and mentality, but lacking that magnetic element of personality which psychologists call color. To make it still plainer, I never felt in those dark days that I was even complete companionship for myself, which is a sorry state indeed, and can be known only to those who have experienced it.
Tonight I know what has been behind it all—a stranger fate than I
