Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [1372]

Since then there had been no further communication between them, and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books her read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent—that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there. — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 1372

Note

Wharton inverts Archer’s inner/outer worlds: the imagined life becomes ‘real’ and the lived life unreal. The trope of the absent-minded man bumping into his own furniture makes the alienation concrete and bodily, and ‘Absent—that was what he was’ isolates the diagnosis with a dash.