cardboard masks of all the people i've been.

Thus I began my new life, in a new name,

and with everything new about me.

Now that the state of doubt was over,

I felt, for many days, like one in a dream.

I never thought of anything about myself, distinctly.

The two things clearest in my mind were,

that a remoteness had come upon the old Blunderstone life—

which seemed to lie in the haze of an immeasurable distance;

and that a curtain had for ever fallen on my life at Murdstone and Grinby’s.
No one has ever raised that curtain since.

I have lifted it for a moment, even in this narrative,

with a reluctant hand, and dropped it gladly.

The remembrance of that life is fraught with so much pain to me,

with so much mental suffering and want of hope,

that I have never had the courage even to examine

how long I was doomed to lead it.

Whether it lasted for a year, or more, or less, I do not know.

I only know that it was, and ceased to be;

and that I have written, and there I leave it.

-Charles Dickens