I can be standing in line at the grocery store or walking along peacefully when suddenly I am struck by this question: What is this? And then everything falls apart, or rather becomes one, or maybe it just blends together. There is no difference between my hands and the air as I move them through the thickness of reality.

It's not depression, because I know that, and I am never going back there. It's more like the relief of seeing things as they are, and knowing that you're infinitely small and that in that lies immense freedom. Maybe it's a trick of the mind, just like coherence and categories. Everything floats.

I am reminded of Calvino's short story "The Flash," in which a person has a brief psychedelic experience that dissipates as quickly as it arrives.

"Yet, even now, every time (and it is often) that I find I do not understand something, then, instinctively, I am filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp the other knowledge, found and lost in an instant."

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