Purging

That night I shut myself in my room, barred my windows, drew my curtains, and made a great destruction.  All books or pictures which recalled to me the moorlands were ruthlessly doomed.  Novels, poems, treatises I flung into an old box, for sale to the second-hand bookseller.  Some prints and water-colour sketches I tore to pieces with my own hands.  I ransacked my fishing-book, and condemned all tackle for moorland waters to the flames. I wrote a letter to my solicitors, bidding them to go no further in the purchase of a place in Lorne I had long been thinking of.  Then, and not till then, did I feel the bondage of the past a little loosed from my shoulders.  I made myself a night-cap of rum-punch instead of my usual whisky-toddy, that all associations with that dismal land might be forgotten, and to complete the renunciation I returned to cigars and flung my pipe into a drawer.

But when I woke in the morning I found that it is hard to get rid of memories.  My feet were still sore and wounded, and when I felt my arms cramped and reflected on the causes, there was that black memory always near to vex me.

From No-Man's Land (John Buchan, 1898)