There is the most touching moving section in this book that I don't think I'll ever forget. It was the clue to Speaking of Love http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3369205-speaking-of-love and the most poignant (and simple) analysis of the human origins of madness that I've read. The protagonist, Merivel, has become a Quaker and works at an asylum. Without knowing he's going to break his silence at the Meetings, he does. He says, while at the same time trying to stop himself from speaking, that, 'Madness may be born of many things but yet for all except those who are lunatic from their births there was a Time Before, a time when there was no madness in them and that this would be followed by a Growing Time or a Sickening Time, when the madness was coming upon them, precisely as all disease has a Growing Time. ... But what we do not ask, dear Friends, is what were the Footsteps of each case of madness. ... We should try with each one of those in our care to look back into past time and ask them to try to remember how it was to be in the Time Before and what thing or calamity came about to put them into the Sickening Time. And in this way we might discover the imprint of the steps to madness ... .'