UNDER THE KNIFE
"What if I die under it?" The thought recurred again and again, as Iwalked home from Haddon's. It was a purely personal question. I wasspared the deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there were fewof my intimate friends but would find my death troublesome chiefly onaccount of their duty of regret. I was surprised indeed, and perhapsa little humiliated, as I turned the matter over, to think how fewcould possibly exceed the conventional requirement. Things camebefore me stripped of glamour, in a clear dry light, during that walkfrom Haddon's house over Primrose Hill. There were the friends of myyouth: I perceived now that our affection was a tradition, which weforegathered rather laboriously to maintain. There were the rivalsand helpers of my later career: I suppose I had been cold-blooded orundemonstrative--one perhaps implies the other. It may be that even thecapacity for friendship is a question of physique. There had been atime in my own life when I had grieved bitterly enough at the loss ofa friend; but as I walked home that afternoon the emotional side of myimagination was dormant. I could not pity myself, nor feel sorry formy friends, nor conceive of them as grieving for me.
I was interested in this deadness of my emotional nature--no doubta concomitant of my stagnating physiology; and my thoughts wanderedoff along the line it suggested. Once before, in my hot youth, Ihad suffered a sudden loss of blood, and had been within an ace ofdeath. I remembered now that my affections as well as my passions haddrained out of me, leaving scarce anything but a tranquil resignation,a dreg of self-pity. It had been weeks before the old ambitions,and tendernesses, and all the complex moral interplay of a man, hadreasserted themselves. It occurred to me that the real meaning ofthis numbness might be a gradual slipping away from the pleasure-painguidance of the animal man. It has been proven, I take it, asthoroughly as anything can be proven in this world, that the higheremotions, the moral feelings, even the subtle tendernesses of love, areevolved from the elemental desires and fears of the simple animal: theyare the harness in which man's mental freedom goes. And it may be that,as death overshadows us, as our possibility of acting diminishes, thiscomplex growth of balanced impulse, propensity, and aversion, whoseinterplay inspires our acts, goes with it. Leaving what?
I was suddenly brought back to reality by an imminent collision witha butcher-boy's tray. I found that I was crossing the bridge over theRegent's Park Canal, which runs parallel with that in the ZoologicalGardens. The boy in blue had been looking over his shoulder at a blackbarge advancing slowly, towed by a gaunt white horse. In the Gardensa nurse was leading three happy little children over the bridge. Thetrees were bright green; the spring hopefulness was still unstained bythe dusts of summer; the sky in the water was bright and clear, butbroken by long waves, by quivering bands of black, as the barge drovethrough. The breeze was stirring; but it did not stir me as the springbreeze used to do.
Was this dulness of feeling in itself an anticipation? It was curiousthat I could reason and follow out a network of suggestion as clearlyas ever: so, at least, it seemed to me. It was calmness rather thandulness that was coming upon me. Was there any ground for the belief inthe presentiment of death? Did a man near to death begin instinctivelyto withdraw himself from the meshes of matter and sense, even beforethe cold hand was laid upon his? I felt strangely isolated--isolatedwithout regret--from the life and existence about me. The childrenplaying in the sun and gathering strength and experience for thebusiness of life, the park-keeper gossiping with a nursemaid, thenursing mother, the young couple intent upon each other as they passedme, the trees by the wayside spreading new pleading leaves to thesunlight, the stir in their branches--I had been part of it all, but Ihad nearly done with it now.
Some way down the Broad Walk I perceived that I was tired, and that myfeet were heavy. It was hot that afternoon, and I turned aside and satdown on one of the green chairs that line the way. In a minute I haddozed into a dream, and the tide of my thoughts washed up a visionof the resurrection. I was still sitting in the chair, but I thoughtmyself actually dead, withered, tattered, dried, one eye (I saw) peckedout by birds. "Awake!" cried a voice; and incontinently the dust of thepath and the mould under the grass became insurgent. I had never beforethought of Regent's Park as a cemetery, but now, through the trees,stretching as far as eye could see, I beheld a flat plain of writhinggraves and heeling tombstones. There seemed to be some trouble: therising dead appeared to stifle as they struggled upward, they bled intheir struggles, the red flesh was tattered away from the white bones."Awake!" cried a voice; but I determined I would not rise to suchhorrors. "Awake!" They would not let me alone. "Wike up!" said an angryvoice. A cockney angel! The man who sells the tickets was shaking me,demanding my penny.
I paid my penny, pocketed my ticket, yawned, stretched my legs, and,feeling now rather less torpid, got up and walked on towards LanghamPlace. I speedily lost myself again in a shifting maze of thoughtsabout death. Going across Marylebone Road into that crescent at the endof Langham Place, I had the narrowest escape from the shaft of a cab,and went on my way with a palpitating heart and a bruised shoulder. Itstruck me that it would have been curious if my meditations on my deathon the morrow had led to my death that day.
But I will not weary you with more of my experiences that day andthe next. I knew more and more certainly that I should die under theoperation; at times I think I was inclined to pose to myself. Thedoctors were coming at eleven, and I did not get up. It seemed scarceworth while to trouble about washing and dressing, and though I readmy newspapers and the letters that came by the first post, I did notfind them very interesting. There was a friendly note from Addison,my old school friend, calling my attention to two discrepancies anda printer's error in my new book, with one from Langridge ventingsome vexation over Minton. The rest were business communications. Ibreakfasted in bed. The glow of pain at my side seemed more massive.I knew it was pain, and yet, if you can understand, I did not find itvery painful. I had been awake and hot and thirsty in the night, but inthe morning bed felt comfortable. In the night-time I had lain thinkingof things that were past; in the morning I dozed over the question ofimmortality. Haddon came, punctual to the minute, with a neat blackbag; and Mowbray soon followed. Their arrival stirred me up a little. Ibegan to take a more personal interest in the proceedings. Haddon movedthe little octagonal table close to the bedside, and, with his broadblack back to me, began taking things out of his bag. I heard the lightclick of steel upon steel. My imagination, I found, was not altogetherstagnant. "Will you hurt me much?" I said in an off-hand tone.
"Not a bit," Haddon answered over his shoulder. "We shall chloroformyou. Your heart's as sound as a bell." And as he spoke, I had a whiffof the pungent sweetness of the anaesthetic.
They stretched me out, with a convenient exposure of my side, and,almost before I realised what was happening, the chloroform was beingadministered. It stings the nostrils, and there is a suffocatingsensation, at first. I knew I should die--that this was the end ofconsciousness for me. And suddenly I felt that I was not prepared fordeath: I had a vague sense of a duty overlooked--I knew not what. Whatwas it I had not done? I could think of nothing more to do, nothingdesirable left in life; and yet I had the strangest disinclinationto death. And the physical sensation was painfully oppressive. Ofcourse the doctors did not know they were going to kill me. PossiblyI struggled. Then I fell motionless, and a great silence, a monstroussilence, and an impenetrable blackness came upon me.
There must have been an interval of absolute unconsciousness,seconds or minutes. Then, with a chilly, unemotional clearness, Iperceived that I was not yet dead. I was still in my body; but all themultitudinous sensations that come sweeping from it to make up thebackground of consciousness had gone, leaving me free of it all. No,not free of it all; for as yet something still held me to the poorstark flesh upon the bed--held me, yet not so closely that I did notfeel myself external to it, independent of it, straining away from it.I do not think I saw, I do not think I heard; but I perceived all thatwas going on, and it was
as if I both heard and saw. Haddon was bendingover me, Mowbray behind me; the scalpel--it was a large scalpel--wascutting my flesh at the side under the flying ribs. It was interestingto see myself cut like cheese, without a pang, without even a qualm.The interest was much of a quality with that one might feel in a gameof chess between strangers. Haddon's face was firm and his hand steady;but I was surprised to perceive (_how_ I know not) that he was feelingthe gravest doubt as to his own wisdom in the conduct of the operation.
Mowbray's thoughts, too, I could see. He was thinking that Haddon'smanner showed too much of the specialist. New suggestions came up likebubbles through a stream of frothing meditation, and burst one afteranother in the little bright spot of his consciousness. He could nothelp noticing and admiring Haddon's swift dexterity, in spite of hisenvious quality and his disposition to detract. I saw my liver exposed.I was puzzled at my own condition. I did not feel that I was dead, butI was different in some way from my living self. The grey depression,that had weighed on me for a year or more and coloured all my thoughts,was gone. I perceived and thought without any emotional tint at all.I wondered if everyone perceived things in this way under chloroform,and forgot it again when he came out of it. It would be inconvenient tolook into some heads, and not forget.
Although I did not think that I was dead, I still perceived quiteclearly that I was soon to die. This brought me back to theconsideration of Haddon's proceedings. I looked into his mind, andsaw that he was afraid of cutting a branch of the portal vein. Myattention was distracted from details by the curious changes going onin his mind. His consciousness was like the quivering little spot oflight which is thrown by the mirror of a galvanometer. His thoughtsran under it like a stream, some through the focus bright and distinct,some shadowy in the half-light of the edge. Just now the little glowwas steady; but the least movement on Mowbray's part, the slightestsound from outside, even a faint difference in the slow movement ofthe living flesh he was cutting, set the light-spot shivering andspinning. A new sense-impression came rushing up through the flow ofthoughts; and lo! the light-spot jerked away towards it, swifter thana frightened fish. It was wonderful to think that upon that unstable,fitful thing depended all the complex motions of the man; that forthe next five minutes, therefore, my life hung upon its movements.And he was growing more and more nervous in his work. It was as if alittle picture of a cut vein grew brighter, and struggled to oust fromhis brain another picture of a cut falling short of the mark. He wasafraid: his dread of cutting too little was battling with his dread ofcutting too far.
Then, suddenly, like an escape of water from under a lock-gate, agreat uprush of horrible realisation set all his thoughts swirling,and simultaneously I perceived that the vein was cut. He started backwith a hoarse exclamation, and I saw the brown-purple blood gatherin a swift bead, and run trickling. He was horrified. He pitched thered-stained scalpel on to the octagonal table; and instantly bothdoctors flung themselves upon me, making hasty and ill-conceivedefforts to remedy the disaster. "Ice!" said Mowbray, gasping. But Iknew that I was killed, though my body still clung to me.
I will not describe their belated endeavours to save me, though Iperceived every detail. My perceptions were sharper and swifterthan they had ever been in life; my thoughts rushed through my mindwith incredible swiftness, but with perfect definition. I can onlycompare their crowded clarity to the effects of a reasonable doseof opium. In a moment it would all be over, and I should be free. Iknew I was immortal, but what would happen I did not know. Should Idrift off presently, like a puff of smoke from a gun, in some kind ofhalf-material body, an attenuated version of my material self? ShouldI find myself suddenly among the innumerable hosts of the dead, andknow the world about me for the phantasmagoria it had always seemed?Should I drift to some spiritualistic _seance_, and there make foolish,incomprehensible attempts to affect a purblind medium? It was astate of unemotional curiosity, of colourless expectation. And thenI realised a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some hugehuman magnet was drawing me upward out of my body. The stress grew andgrew. I seemed an atom for which monstrous forces were fighting. Forone brief, terrible moment sensation came back to me. That feeling offalling headlong which comes in nightmares, that feeling a thousandtimes intensified, that and a black horror swept across my thoughts ina torrent. Then the two doctors, the naked body with its cut side, thelittle room, swept away from under me and vanished, as a speck of foamvanishes down an eddy.
I was in mid-air. Far below was the West End of London, recedingrapidly,--for I seemed to be flying swiftly upward,--and, as itreceded, passing westward, like a panorama. I could see, through thefaint haze of smoke, the innumerable roofs chimney-set, the narrowroadways, stippled with people and conveyances, the little specksof squares, and the church steeples like thorns sticking out of thefabric. But it spun away as the earth rotated on its axis, and in afew seconds (as it seemed) I was over the scattered clumps of townabout Ealing, the little Thames a thread of blue to the south, and theChiltern Hills and the North Downs coming up like the rim of a basin,far away and faint with haze. Up I rushed. And at first I had not thefaintest conception what this headlong rush upward could mean.
Every moment the circle of scenery beneath me grew wider and wider,and the details of town and field, of hill and valley, got more andmore hazy and pale and indistinct, a luminous grey was mingled moreand more with the blue of the hills and the green of the open meadows;and a little patch of cloud, low and far to the west, shone ever moredazzlingly white. Above, as the veil of atmosphere between myself andouter space grew thinner, the sky, which had been a fair springtimeblue at first, grew deeper and richer in colour, passing steadilythrough the intervening shades, until presently it was as dark asthe blue sky of midnight, and presently as black as the blackness ofa frosty starlight, and at last as black as no blackness I had everbeheld. And first one star, and then many, and at last an innumerablehost broke out upon the sky: more stars than anyone has ever seen fromthe face of the earth. For the blueness of the sky is the light of thesun and stars sifted and spread abroad blindingly: there is diffusedlight even in the darkest skies of winter, and we do not see the starsby day only because of the dazzling irradiation of the sun. But now Isaw things--I know not how; assuredly with no mortal eyes--and thatdefect of bedazzlement blinded me no longer. The sun was incrediblystrange and wonderful. The body of it was a disc of blinding whitelight: not yellowish, as it seems to those who live upon the earth, butlivid white, all streaked with scarlet streaks and rimmed about with afringe of writhing tongues of red fire. And, shooting half-way acrossthe heavens from either side of it, and brighter than the Milky Way,were two pinions of silver-white, making it look more like those wingedglobes I have seen in Egyptian sculpture, than anything else I canremember upon earth. These I knew for the solar corona, though I hadnever seen anything of it but a picture during the days of my earthlylife.
When my attention came back to the earth again, I saw that ithad fallen very far away from me. Field and town were long sinceindistinguishable, and all the varied hues of the country were merginginto a uniform bright grey, broken only by the brilliant white of theclouds that lay scattered in flocculent masses over Ireland and thewest of England. For now I could see the outlines of the north ofFrance and Ireland, and all this island of Britain, save where Scotlandpassed over the horizon to the north, or where the coast was blurredor obliterated by cloud. The sea was a dull grey, and darker than theland; and the whole panorama was rotating slowly towards the east.
All this had happened so swiftly that, until I was some thousand milesor so from the earth, I had no thought for myself. But now I perceivedI had neither hands nor feet, neither parts nor organs, and that I feltneither alarm nor pain. All about me I perceived that the vacancy (forI had already left the air behind) was cold beyond the imagination ofman; but it troubled me not. The sun's rays shot through the void,powerless to light or heat until they should strike on matter in theircourse. I saw things with a serene self-forgetfulnes
s, even as if Iwere God. And down below there, rushing away from me,--countless milesin a second,--where a little dark spot on the grey marked the positionof London, two doctors were struggling to restore life to the poorhacked and outworn shell I had abandoned. I felt then such release,such serenity as I can compare to no mortal delight I have ever known.
It was only after I had perceived all these things that the meaning ofthat headlong rush of the earth grew into comprehension. Yet it wasso simple, so obvious, that I was amazed at my never anticipating thething that was happening to me. I had suddenly been cut adrift frommatter: all that was material of me was there upon earth, whirlingaway through space, held to the earth by gravitation, partaking of theearth-inertia, moving in its wreath of epicycles round the sun, andwith the sun and the planets on their vast march through space. Butthe immaterial has no inertia, feels nothing of the pull of matterfor matter: where it parts from its garment of flesh, there it remains(so far as space concerns it any longer) immovable in space. I was notleaving the earth: the earth was leaving _me_, and not only the earth,but the whole solar system was streaming past. And about me in space,invisible to me, scattered in the wake of the earth upon its journey,there must be an innumerable multitude of souls, stripped like myselfof the material, stripped like myself of the passions of the individualand the generous emotions of the gregarious brute, naked intelligences,things of newborn wonder and thought, marvelling at the strange releasethat had suddenly come on them!
As I receded faster and faster from the strange white sun in the blackheavens, and from the broad and shining earth upon which my being hadbegun, I seemed to grow, in some incredible manner, vast: vast asregards this world I had left, vast as regards the moments and periodsof a human life. Very soon I saw the full circle of the earth, slightlygibbous, like the moon when she nears her full, but very large; andthe silvery shape of America was now in the noonday blaze wherein (asit seemed) little England had been basking but a few minutes ago. Atfirst the earth was large, and shone in the heavens, filling a greatpart of them; but every moment she grew smaller and more distant. Asshe shrunk, the broad moon in its third quarter crept into view overthe rim of her disc. I looked for the constellations. Only that part ofAries directly behind the sun and the Lion, which the earth covered,were hidden. I recognised the tortuous, tattered band of the MilkyWay, with Vega very bright between sun and earth; and Sirius and Orionshone splendid against the unfathomable blackness in the oppositequarter of the heavens. The Pole Star was overhead, and the Great Bearhung over the circle of the earth. And away beneath and beyond theshining corona of the sun were strange groupings of stars I had neverseen in my life--notably, a dagger-shaped group that I knew for theSouthern Cross. All these were no larger than when they had shone onearth; but the little stars that one scarce sees shone now against thesetting of black vacancy as brightly as the first-magnitudes had done,while the larger worlds were points of indescribable glory and colour.Aldebaran was a spot of blood-red fire, and Sirius condensed to onepoint the light of a world of sapphires. And they shone steadily: theydid not scintillate, they were calmly glorious. My impressions had anadamantine hardness and brightness: there was no blurring softness,no atmosphere, nothing but infinite darkness set with the myriads ofthese acute and brilliant points and specks of light. Presently, whenI looked again, the little earth seemed no bigger than the sun, andit dwindled and turned as I looked, until, in a second's space (as itseemed to me), it was halved; and so it went on swiftly dwindling. Faraway in the opposite direction, a little pinkish pin's head of light,shining steadily, was the planet Mars. I swam motionless in vacancy,and, without a trace of terror or astonishment, watched the speck ofcosmic dust we call the world fall away from me.
Presently it dawned upon me that my sense of duration had changed: thatmy mind was moving not faster but infinitely slower, that between eachseparate impression there was a period of many days. The moon spun onceround the earth as I noted this; and I perceived clearly the motion ofMars in his orbit. Moreover, it appeared as if the time between thoughtand thought grew steadily greater, until at last a thousand years wasbut a moment in my perception.
At first the constellations had shone motionless against the blackbackground of infinite space; but presently it seemed as though thegroup of stars about Hercules and the Scorpion was contracting, whileOrion and Aldebaran and their neighbours were scattering apart.Flashing suddenly out of the darkness there came a flying multitudeof particles of rock, glittering like dust-specks in a sunbeam, andencompassed in a faintly luminous haze. They swirled all about me,and vanished again in a twinkling far behind. And then I saw that abright spot of light, that shone a little to one side of my path, wasgrowing very rapidly larger, and perceived that it was the planetSaturn rushing towards me. Larger and larger it grew, swallowing up theheavens behind it, and hiding every moment a fresh multitude of stars.I perceived its flattened, whirling body, its disc-like belt, and sevenof its little satellites. It grew and grew, till it towered enormous;and then I plunged amid a streaming multitude of clashing stones anddancing dust-particles and gas-eddies, and saw for a moment the mightytriple belt like three concentric arches of moonlight above me, itsshadow black on the boiling tumult below. These things happened inone-tenth of the time it takes to tell of them. The planet went by likea flash of lightning; for a few seconds it blotted out the sun, andthere and then became a mere black, dwindling, winged patch against thelight. The earth, the mother mote of my being, I could no longer see.
So, with a stately swiftness, in the profoundest silence, the solarsystem fell from me, as it had been a garment, until the sun was a merestar amid the multitude of stars, with its eddy of planet-specks, lostin the confused glittering of the remoter light. I was no longer adenizen of the solar system: I had come to the Outer Universe, I seemedto grasp and comprehend the whole world of matter. Ever more swiftlythe stars closed in about the spot where Antares and Vega had vanishedin a luminous haze, until that part of the sky had the semblance ofa whirling mass of nebulae, and ever before me yawned vaster gaps ofvacant blackness, and the stars shone fewer and fewer. It seemed as ifI moved towards a point between Orion's belt and sword; and the voidabout that region opened vaster and vaster every second, an incrediblegulf of nothingness, into which I was falling. Faster and ever fasterthe universe rushed by, a hurry of whirling motes at last, speedingsilently into the void. Stars glowing brighter and brighter, withtheir circling planets catching the light in a ghostly fashion as Ineared them, shone out and vanished again into inexistence; faintcomets, clusters of meteorites, winking specks of matter, eddying lightpoints, whizzed past, some perhaps a hundred millions of miles or sofrom me at most, few nearer, travelling with unimaginable rapidity,shooting constellations, momentary darts of fire, through that black,enormous night. More than anything else it was like a dusty draught,sunbeam-lit. Broader, and wider, and deeper grew the starless space,the vacant Beyond, into which I was being drawn. At last a quarter ofthe heavens was black and blank, and the whole headlong rush of stellaruniverse closed in behind me like a veil of light that is gatheredtogether. It drove away from me like a monstrous jack-o'-lantern drivenby the wind. I had come out into the wilderness of space. Ever thevacant blackness grew broader, until the hosts of the stars seemedonly like a swarm of fiery specks hurrying away from me, inconceivablyremote, and the darkness, the nothingness and emptiness, was about meon every side. Soon the little universe of matter, the cage of pointsin which I had begun to be, was dwindling, now to a whirling disc ofluminous glittering, and now to one minute disc of hazy light. In alittle while it would shrink to a point, and at last would vanishaltogether.
Suddenly feeling came back to me--feeling in the shape of overwhelmingterror: such a dread of those dark vastitudes as no words can describe,a passionate resurgence of sympathy and social desire. Were thereother souls, invisible to me as I to them, about me in the blackness?or was I indeed, even as I felt, alone? Had I passed out of beinginto something that was neither being nor not-being? T
he coveringof the body, the covering of matter, had been torn from me, and thehallucinations of companionship and security. Everything was black andsilent. I had ceased to be. I was nothing. There was nothing, save onlythat infinitesimal dot of light that dwindled in the gulf. I strainedmyself to hear and see, and for a while there was naught but infinitesilence, intolerable darkness, horror, and despair.
Then I saw that about the spot of light into which the whole world ofmatter had shrunk there was a faint glow. And in a band on either sideof that the darkness was not absolute. I watched it for ages, as itseemed to me, and through the long waiting the haze grew imperceptiblymore distinct. And then about the band appeared an irregular cloudof the faintest, palest brown. I felt a passionate impatience; butthe things grew brighter so slowly that they scarce seemed to change.What was unfolding itself? What was this strange reddish dawn in theinterminable night of space?
The cloud's shape was grotesque. It seemed to be looped along its lowerside into four projecting masses, and, above, it ended in a straightline. What phantom was it? I felt assured I had seen that figurebefore; but I could not think what, nor where, nor when it was. Thenthe realisation rushed upon me. _It was a clenched Hand._ I was alonein space, alone with this huge, shadowy Hand, upon which the wholeUniverse of Matter lay like an unconsidered speck of dust. It seemedas though I watched it through vast periods of time. On the forefingerglittered a ring; and the universe from which I had come was but a spotof light upon the ring's curvature. And the thing that the hand grippedhad the likeness of a black rod. Through a long eternity I watchedthis Hand, with the ring and the rod, marvelling and fearing andwaiting helplessly on what might follow. It seemed as though nothingcould follow: that I should watch for ever, seeing only the Hand andthe thing it held, and understanding nothing of its import. Was thewhole universe but a refracting speck upon some greater Being? Were ourworlds but the atoms of another universe, and those again of another,and so on through an endless progression? And what was I? Was I indeedimmaterial? A vague persuasion of a body gathering about me came intomy suspense. The abysmal darkness about the Hand filled with impalpablesuggestions, with uncertain, fluctuating shapes.
Then, suddenly, came a sound, like the sound of a tolling bell: faint,as if infinitely far; muffled, as though heard through thick swathingsof darkness: a deep, vibrating resonance, with vast gulfs of silencebetween each stroke. And the Hand appeared to tighten on the rod. AndI saw far above the Hand, towards the apex of the darkness, a circleof dim phosphorescence, a ghostly sphere whence these sounds camethrobbing; and at the last stroke the Hand vanished, for the hour hadcome, and I heard a noise of many waters. But the black rod remainedas a great band across the sky. And then a voice, which seemed to runto the uttermost parts of space, spoke, saying, "There will be no morepain."
At that an almost intolerable gladness and radiance rushed in uponme, and I saw the circle shining white and bright, and the rod blackand shining, and many things else distinct and clear. And the circlewas the face of the clock, and the rod the rail of my bed. Haddon wasstanding at the foot, against the rail, with a small pair of scissorson his fingers; and the hands of my clock on the mantel over hisshoulder were clasped together over the hour of twelve. Mowbray waswashing something in a basin at the octagonal table, and at my side Ifelt a subdued feeling that could scarce be spoken of as pain.
The operation had not killed me. And I perceived, suddenly, that thedull melancholy of half a year was lifted from my mind.