He sat on a deck chair on the steamboat back to Newport that evening, he and Perry keeping apart as the creaking vessel paddled slowly home. While he watched the dwindling light and wallowed in the fading heat, he felt involved for once in an America which he had kept himself apart. He had listened carefully but he had not known how to respond. He tried to imagine that a young man's life under the canvas battling for survival, expecting the worse while hoping for home. He tried to conjure up the moment when the surgeon's knife was solemnly unsheathed and the leg held down, and whatever available morphine and whisky were taken , and the arms were pinned back and the gag put into the mouth. He wanted to hold his young friend, help him now that the worst was over, take him home to his family to be looked after. But he also knew that , as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut untill the morning came and he would not be disturbed. The gap between those two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of a having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and expeirencing singly and alone its own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency -Colm Toibin, The Master.
