Marathe and Kate at Ryle's (p. 780)
‘I tried to leave the soft-head and cerebro-spinally incontinent woman, m’épouse au future, behind at the hôpital of grave nature and to wheel off into my new life of uncaged acceptance and choice. I would roll into the fraying of battle for my despoiled nation, for now I saw the point not of winning but of choosing merely to fight. But I had travelled no more than several revolutions of the fauteuil when the old despair of before choosing this no-skull creature rose up once again inside me. Within several revolutions there was no point again and no legs, and only fear of the pain that made me not choose. Pain rolled me backwards to this woman, my wife.’
Context
The relapse mechanics of the cage: the cure isn't the rescue-moment but the sustained choosing, and "the old despair" reasserts itself within several wheel-revolutions of abandoning it. Depression here behaves exactly like the Substance in the AA chapters — waiting, ready the moment the choice lapses. (Same page: "The fear of the pain is many times worse than the pain of the pain.")