I jumped up without waiting for the waking Bell and began to pace up and down the room. My mathematics, the only firm and immovable island of my shaken life, this too was torn from its anchor and was floating, whirling. Then it means that that absurd thing, the “soul,” is as real as my unif, as my boots, although I do not see them since they are behind the door of the closet. If boots are not a sickness, why should the “soul” be one? I sought, but I could not find, a way out of the logical confusion. It looked to me like that strange and sad debris beyond the Green Wall; my logical debris too, is filled with extraordinary, incomprehensible, wordless but speaking beings. It occurred to me for a moment that through some strange, thick glass I saw it ; I saw it at once infinitely large and infinitely small, scorpion-like with hidden but ever perceptible sting; I saw the square-root of minus one. Perhaps it was nothing else but my “soul,” which like the legendary scorpion of the ancients, was voluntarily stinging itself with.⁠ ⁠…