Shadows of Ecstasy by Charles Williams — Read

For some time after Considine had left him Roger did nothing. He sat on the verandah and looked out over the grass lawn and the terrace at the sea which lay beyond. And he thought to himself that never in his life had he felt so much, so idiotically, like a baby as he did now. Apart from that recurrent thought he couldn't think. "It's the shock," he said, half-aloud from time to time, but without convincing himself of anything whatsoever, without indeed particularly wanting to convince himself.

A movement or two of a dead hand, of the hand of a man whom even Considine had now abandoned. It had failed, but it had come very near to succeeding. Roger--product of at least a semi-culture of education and intellect--sat there and felt that culture and education and intellect had all vanished together, all but the very simplest intellect. Even his passion for literature had disappeared; he simply wasn't up to it--he had no more wish or capacity for Milton or Shakespeare than a small child, who might laugh if some of the lines were mouthed at him but would be lost and vacant-eyed if anyone tried to explain them or quoted them seriously. That dead hand moving had abolished the whole edifice of his mind; he sat and stared at the sea. In London things had been different; he had been thrilled and romanticized. In London there was no sea, and no golden-hung rooms with a couch on which a dead man lay. In London these things didn't happen. He had heard and believed, but here belief was abolished; he was confronted with the simple fact. It had to be accepted, and its acceptance was what reduced him to a state of infancy.