<i>Damn these indecisions!</i> This accursed difficulty of deciding, of deciding anything at all, seemed to have grown into an obsession with him. To… - John Cowper Powys

And yet he did genuinely love Cordelia. Not with any kind of physical love. That was impossible. But with a feeling of pity that shook the foundations of his nature.

It always gave Wolf a peculiar thrill thus to tighten his grip upon his stick, thus to wrap himself more closely in his faded overcoat. Objects of this kind played a queer part in his secret life-illusion. His stick was like a plough-handle, a ship's runner, a gun, a spade, a sword, a spear. His threadbare overcoat was like a medieval jerkin, like a monk's habit, like a classic toga! It gave him a primeval delight merely to move one foot in front of the other, merely to prod the ground with his stick, merely to feel the flapping of his coat about his knees, when this mood predominated. It always associated itself with his consciousness of the historic continuity — -so incredibly charged with marvels of dreamy fancy — -of human beings moving to and fro across the earth. It associated itself, too, with his deep, obstinate quarrel with modern inventions, with modern machinery....

"What is wrong with so many clever people to-day is the fatal distrust lodged in their minds — and lodged there by a superstitious awe in the presence of transitory scientific theories — of the power in their own souls. What we need — and the key to it lies in ourselves — is a bold return to the magical view of life. I don't mean to the magic of Madame Blavatsky, but to that kind of faith in the potentialities of the ego, with which all great poetry and all great philosophy has been concerned. That feeling of exultant liberation from the immediate pressure of practical life, which any "logos" from the arena of Goethe, of Spinoza, or Leonardo, or Plato, or Heraclitus, or Epictetus, or the old Chinese Taoists conveys, is what we need."