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in full force much later, however, and only on the day when I finally obtained my coffin again, an event of great magnitude, coming as it did after such sustained desolation. And then once again would it be proved to me that solely by the careful and proper observation of rite and ceremony and the methodical, informed use of artifact may the mind of the living be permitted the transcendent experience of contemplation of the dead, which in turn is the only way to obtain a proper understanding of the meaning of life. All other means, despite the best of intentions, are but approximate and ultimately misleading. And innocence leads nowhere at all. (The Book of Discipline, viii, 23-25.)
    How it came to pass that I obtained a new coffin will be described near the end of this testament. In the meantime, let the reader imagine me, in the descriptions to follow immediately, as daily, usually in the afternoons, engaging in the awful practices and depravities I have described above, while during the mornings and evenings I passed my time in peaceful argument with my jailor (for we had become brothers of a sort and an exchange of views between us was a natural extension of our new affiliation) and also with diverse other prisoners who were of a religious turn of mind but who were not of my faith. For my purpose now is to reveal how the mind of the fallen man, the man who has allowed his attention to wander off the dead and fix itself onto the living only, swiftly divides itself into segments, boxes of thought, attitude and activity with no necessary or discernible link, consistency or communication between them, resulting inevitably in that pathetic and sorrowful figure, the man of time.
    T HE man of time is without self-unity. I was now such a man. Every day early in the day, I hailed my jailor Jacob Moon in his office at the bottom of the stone staircase that spined the prison, and upon first catching sight of his grim and wholly pragmatic face, the face of a man who had long ago made of himself a tool to fit what he regarded as the job of life, I instantly arranged my own face into a matching mask, and because he never signalled with a wave or other such greeting gesture, neither would I make any gesture. After I had initially hailed him with the sober utterance of his name, Jacob, I merely entered his office and leaned against the jambs, like a wrench or sledge hammer laid there by a workman, and we commenced to speak, drily and without feeling, of economic and political affairs in foreign lands or the difficulties encountered by certain civil engineering projects or the desirability of a central heating system for the prison.
    Gone from me now the glorious, unifying vision that had come to me with my faith when I was but a boy. Gone from me now the work of my calling, which was to make coffins. Gone from me the ways of being used in a process larger than that of my own decaying body’s, gone from me the affectionate need of the community. Gone from me now even the need of my brethren in the faith, for not enough of them had followed to where I had been led, and then only a few had known, until this account, my reasons for having forsaken death and clung to imprisonment. And gone from me the urgent presence of my five children, their wonderings, their desires and needs that the incomprehensible be made comprehensible. And now, now, gone the cleaving presence and trust of my wife, for she more than any other person, except for me myself, knew now of my weakness and the state to which I had fallen. And finally, of greatest significance, gone from me the dead, gone timelessness, gone its continuous flow of wisdom, gone its absolute clarity. Gone from me now was I myself, and all that remained were the hard bright surfaces of a self that generated no light but merely reflected back whatever surfaces it met. For once a man loses his connection with whatever looms forever larger than himself, he has lost himself as well. He exists