Another quote from Henry James' The Sacred Fount

Let us return to Henry James and to a work of his I have mentioned and quoted earlier in this blog, The Sacred Fount.

At a certain point the lead character, the first-person pronoun protagonist, starts to doubt that all his ratiocinations about the relationships of the other people in his social circle have a firm hold on reality.

This is how he expresses that doubt to himself.

"I could toss the ball myself. I could catch it and send it back, and familiarity had now made this exercise -- in my own inner precincts --easy and safe. But the mere brush of Lady John's clumsier curiosity made me tremble for the impurity of my creation. If there had been, so to speak, a discernment, however feeble, of my discernment, it would have been irresistible to me to take this as the menace of some incalculable catastrophe or some public ugliness."

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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