I have been living like this for five years. It doesn't seem like long--but then, if I got a five-year prison sentence it would seem very long. Prison. People think the terrible thing about prison is the other prisoners--rape, brutality, murder. But did you know that in the first modern prisons, the ones on the East Coast of the 19th century, they kept you isolated in your own cell, with a little garden in back, for the whole duration of the sentence? You never got to see another human being--you couldn't even see the person who slid you your food. They let you go out to your garden for something like a half-hour each morning. That was it: just you, and your sparse little room, usually a Bible your only reading, for your five years, ten years; however long your sentence was. No rape, no brutality, no murder. The problem was that the prisoners went insane. Suicides were common. People turned rabid as the waters of their personalities churned and boiled over into a frothy madness. Finally, this was considered too cruel, and was replaced by our current system, with all its rape, brutality & murder. Five years I have lived a hermit in his cell, the cheese of time expanding and expanding, now shrinking, now enlarging, becoming devoid of all qualities, becoming dimensionless, becoming the same homogenous thing, any part of it like any other part--oh it is an overflowing, repulsive, mutated thing, constantly metamorphosing, never, never ending. The past five years of my life are cheese--a great, expansive, wilderness of cheese, sickening, slow. Every few months for some of those years I became determined to change things, started bowing to Mecca again, gave up drinking, tried fasting. And then my lonesome wilderness within, like a devil I had charmed into distraction and fled with my Islamic practice, would catch back up to me, as I grew exhausted; and then my prayers would be meaningless rituals, my fasting only so much vain discomfort, the mosque only a Friday task; the demon would catch up, my life would again be sunken below the water table of the Agonies--and I would look at beer with a happy indifference, and I would say to myself, "Of course the Angel didn't sit there and dictate every word to Mohammed--what silliness that is! Did he ask Gabriel to pause when his scribes ran out of ink?" And then I would be overcome by the devils that plague me, and lose my religion at the first challenge. When I first converted there was a sheik visiting the Islamic center where I broke my fast (it was Ramadan). He was the very picture of our ideas of the old, bearded, wise Islamic cleric. He said to me through a translator, "Shaitan is very angry at you for coming to Truth. So be careful if you think you feel a devil speaking to you, tempting to you," but then some other translator interrupted, as if this were superstition that would only make me doubt, and said, "He means if you get thoughts like, 'Oh, Islam is all nonsense--it doesn't matter if you worship a Trinity or One God.' If you get thoughts like that, those come from the devil, so watch out for them." And so now looking back I wonder--have I come around to myself, or have I betrayed myself? I cannot go back to Islam--I cannot. I have come around to myself then--and what I am is a bitter disbeliever, the very enemy the Qur'an denounces, what Islam seeks to cut out of the world and destroy--oh I am demon, I am Shaitan--I am a broken man and a betrayed conscience--and I cannot go back, I cannot.