And so, through this singular mood, I came a little nearer to understand the unpure thing that had stammered out into expression through my sister’s talent.  For the unpure is merely negative; it has no existence; it is but the cramped expression of what is true, stammering its way brokenly over false boundaries that seek to limit and confine.  Great, full expression of anything is pure, whereas here was only the incomplete, unfinished, and therefore ugly.  There was a strife and pain and desire to escape.  I found myself shrinking from house and grounds as one shrinks from the touch of the mentally arrested, those in whom life has turned awry.  There was almost mutilation in it.

Past items, too, now flocked to confirm this feeling that I walked, liberty captured and half-maimed, in a monstrous garden.  I remembered days of rain that refreshed the countryside, but left these grounds, cracked with the summer heat, unsatisfied and thirsty; and how the big winds, that cleaned the woods and fields elsewhere, crawled here with difficulty through the dense foliage that protected The Towers from the North and West and East.  They were ineffective, sluggish currents.  There was no real wind.  Nothing happened.  I began to realize—­far more clearly than in my sister’s fanciful explanation about “layers”—­that here were many contrary influences at work, mutually destructive of one another.  House and grounds were not haunted merely; they were the arena of past thinking and feeling, perhaps of terrible, impure beliefs, each striving to suppress the others, yet no one of them achieving supremacy because no one of them was strong enough, no one of them was true.  Each, moreover, tried to win me over, though only one was able to reach my mind at all.  For some obscure reason—­possibly because my temperament had a natural bias towards the grotesque—­it was the goblin layer.  With me, it was the line of least resistance....

In my own thoughts this “goblin garden” revealed, of course, merely my personal interpretation.  I felt now objectively what long ago my mind had felt subjectively.  My work, essential sign of spontaneous life with me, had stopped dead; production had become impossible.

I stood now considerably closer to the cause of this sterility.  The Cause, rather, turned bolder, had stepped insolently nearer.  Nothing happened anywhere; house, garden, mind alike were barren, abortive, torn by the strife of frustrate impulse, ugly, hateful, sinful.  Yet behind it all was still the desire of life—­desire to escape—­accomplish.  Hope—­an intolerable hope—­I became startlingly aware—­crowned torture.