What I did experience when alone was a sort of general neurotic horror, a common attack of nerves and self-loathing magnified to the power of ten. Every cruel or fatuous thing I'd ever said came back to me with an amplified clarity, no matter how I talked to myself or jerked my head to shake the thoughts away: old insults and guilts and embarrassments stretching clear back to childhood--the crippled boy I'd made fun of, the Easter chick I'd squeezed to death--paraded before me one by one, in vivid and mordant splendor.