thinking thoughts without words--an easy and a pleasant way of
thinking, and one which may lead to something in the long run.

Even his mother was an abstraction to him. He was kind to her so far
as doing things went, but he looked over her, or round her, and marched
away and forgot her.

Sex-blindness carries with it many other darknesses. We do not know
what masculine thing is projected by the feminine consciousness, and
civilisation, even life itself, must stand at a halt until that has
been discovered or created, but art is the female projected by the
male: science is the male projected by the male--as yet a poor thing,
and to remain so until it has become art; that is, has become
fertilised and so more psychological than mechanical. The small part
of science which came to his notice (inventions, machinery, etc.) was
easily and delightedly comprehended by him. He could do intricate
things with a knife and a piece of string, or a hammer and a saw: but a
picture, a poem, a statue, a piece of music--these left him as
uninterested as they found him: more so, in truth, for they left him
bored and dejected.

His mother came to dislike him, and there were many causes and many
justifications for her dislike. She was an orderly, busy, competent
woman, the counterpart of endless millions of her sex, who liked to
understand what she saw or felt, and who had no happiness in reading
riddles. To her he was at times an enigma, and at times again a
simpleton. In both aspects he displeased and embarrassed her. One has
one's sense of property, and in him she could not put her finger on
anything that was hers. We demand continuity, logic in other words,
but between her son and herself there was a gulf fixed, spanned by no
bridge whatever; there was complete isolation; no boat plied between
them at all. All the kindly human things which she loved were
unintelligible to him, and his coarse pleasures or blunt evasions
distressed and bewildered her. When she spoke to him he gaped or
yawned; and yet she did not speak on weighty matters, just the
necessary small-change of existence--somebody's cold, somebody's dress,
somebody's marriage or death. When she addressed him on sterner
subjects, the ground, the weather, the crops, he looked at her as if
she were a baby, he listened with stubborn resentment, and strode away
a confessed boor. There was no contact anywhere between them, and he
was a slow exasperation to her.--What can we do wit