I have suffered a wrong and unjust system. But, somehow, I have
got to make both of these things just and right to me. And exactly
as in Art one is only concerned with what a particular thing is at
a particular moment to oneself, so it is also in the ethical
evolution of one's character. I have got to make everything that
has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the loathsome food,
the hard ropes shredded into oakum till one's finger-tips grow dull
with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and
finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the
dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence,
the solitude, the shame - each and all of these things I have to
transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single
degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a
spiritualising of the soul.

I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite
simply, and without affectation that the two great turning-points
in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society
sent me to prison. I will not say that prison is the best thing
that could have happened to me: for that phrase would savour of
too great bitterness towards myself. I would sooner say, or hear
it said of me, that I was so typical a child of my age, that in my
perversity, and for that perversity's sake, I turned the good
things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good.

What is said, however, by myself or by others, matters little. The
important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I
have to do, if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed,
marred, and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has
been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without