"I recall feeling an almost delicious terror when one day I found myself alone in the midst of tall June grasses that grew high as my head. But here the secret working of self consciousness is almost too entangled with the things of the past for me to explain it"
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An “almost delicious terror” is the giveaway: Loti isn’t confessing fear so much as savoring the moment when fear turns aesthetic. The tall June grasses aren’t just scenery; they’re a child-sized universe that swallows the self, staging that first, vertiginous realization that the world can exist without you at its center. The pleasure comes from the mix of annihilation and attention: being lost, briefly, is also being intensely alive.
Then Loti swerves into a second drama, quieter but sharper: the failure of explanation. “The secret working of self consciousness” suggests the modern mind catching itself in the act, trying to pin down an origin story for interiority and finding only knots. He’s writing from adulthood back toward a primal scene, but memory refuses to behave like evidence. The past is not a stable archive; it’s a tangle that rewrites itself each time you touch it. That admission functions as both humility and strategy: by claiming it’s “almost too entangled,” he preserves the sensation’s mystery and protects it from the flattening effect of analysis.
The context matters. Loti’s work often fetishizes atmosphere and fleeting states of feeling, and this is a classic late-19th-century move: landscape as psychological trigger, nature as the stage where the self is invented, then immediately questioned. What lingers isn’t a plot point but a mechanism: terror becomes “delicious,” and consciousness becomes the real labyrinth.
Then Loti swerves into a second drama, quieter but sharper: the failure of explanation. “The secret working of self consciousness” suggests the modern mind catching itself in the act, trying to pin down an origin story for interiority and finding only knots. He’s writing from adulthood back toward a primal scene, but memory refuses to behave like evidence. The past is not a stable archive; it’s a tangle that rewrites itself each time you touch it. That admission functions as both humility and strategy: by claiming it’s “almost too entangled,” he preserves the sensation’s mystery and protects it from the flattening effect of analysis.
The context matters. Loti’s work often fetishizes atmosphere and fleeting states of feeling, and this is a classic late-19th-century move: landscape as psychological trigger, nature as the stage where the self is invented, then immediately questioned. What lingers isn’t a plot point but a mechanism: terror becomes “delicious,” and consciousness becomes the real labyrinth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
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