But this he only said with his reason⁠—to some extent detached from the rest of him, though after all nearly concerned. As for his natural part, it felt only too much inclined to yield to the confusion which laid hold upon him with his growing fatigue. He even remarked this tendency and took thought to comment upon it. “Here,” said he, “we have the typical reaction of a man who loses himself in the mountains in a snowstorm and never finds his way home.” He gasped out other fragments of the same thought as he went, though he avoided giving it more specific expression. “Whoever hears about it afterwards, imagines it as horrible; but he forgets that disease⁠—and the state I am in is, in a way of speaking, disease⁠—so adjusts its man that it and he can come to terms; there are sensory appeasements, short circuits, a merciful narcosis⁠—yes, oh yes, yes. But one must fight against them, after all, for they are two-faced, they are in the highest degree equivocal, everything depends upon the point of view. If you are not meant to get home, they are a benefaction, they are merciful; but if you mean to get home, they become sinister. I believe I still do. Certainly I don’t intend⁠—in this heart of mine so stormily beating it doesn’t appeal to me in the least⁠—to let myself be snowed under by this idiotically symmetrical crystallometry.”