Commonplace Book

'...What was moving and affecting about Leo, what, at this moment, and in spite if everything, shafted to her heart, was the air of detachment which hung round him like a mist. It was as though he did not quite belong - as though, in spite of all the efforts he made, in spite of the most intimate contacts and a power of the deepest sympathy with others, of active suffering upon their account, he was still not one among other men. He could not ever forget, or lose, himself. He conveyed to every seeing eye a haunted feeling, the tooth-mark of the hidden worm. Leo had been born with the fox inside his shirt, the murdered albatross about his neck, that would never, do what he would, slide off into the sea - until one day it would drop with a dull echo but without a splash, and carry him down with it...'

from The Wanderer's Return, a chapter in Mist in the Tagus by Tom Hopkinson