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Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy
page 63 of 281 (22%)
an interminable time--when, like a flash, the recollection of
everything came back to me. I remembered who and where I
was, and how I had come here, and that these scenes as of the
life of yesterday which had been passing before my mind
concerned a generation long, long ago mouldered to dust.
Leaping from bed, I stood in the middle of the room clasping
my temples with all my might between my hands to keep them
from bursting. Then I fell prone on the couch, and, burying my
face in the pillow, lay without motion. The reaction which was
inevitable, from the mental elation, the fever of the intellect
that had been the first effect of my tremendous experience, had
arrived. The emotional crisis which had awaited the full realization
of my actual position, and all that it implied, was upon me,
and with set teeth and laboring chest, gripping the bedstead
with frenzied strength, I lay there and fought for my sanity. In
my mind, all had broken loose, habits of feeling, associations of
thought, ideas of persons and things, all had dissolved and lost
coherence and were seething together in apparently irretrievable
chaos. There were no rallying points, nothing was left stable.
There only remained the will, and was any human will strong
enough to say to such a weltering sea, "Peace, be still"? I dared
not think. Every effort to reason upon what had befallen me,
and realize what it implied, set up an intolerable swimming of
the brain. The idea that I was two persons, that my identity was
double, began to fascinate me with its simple solution of my
experience.

I knew that I was on the verge of losing my mental balance. If
I lay there thinking, I was doomed. Diversion of some sort I
must have, at least the diversion of physical exertion. I sprang
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