As the situation I reported here is still ongoing, I could do with recovering that sense of reality to which I'm used - you know, with my head in the world rather than cut off from it by a will-sapping and thought-deadening membrane. However, relative to this humdrum world, it appears that 'inexplicable moments of epiphany' are quite common - 'sudden breaks in reality in which we have a vision of an alternative world or of the mysteries which lie behind this one'.
Well, I saw Gary Sobers in action when he was at the top of his game, and there have been plenty of times when I've been 'transported' because of music, drama, film; but I've never had the feeling of having 'slipped through the normal fabric of life'. I don't count as such an experience, incidentally, the smell of a summer downpour on dry earth suddenly taking me back to when I was a boy in Bulawayo, or any similar 'Proustian' moment of being thrust into an earlier time. It's all been very prosaic, I'm bound to say, with so far no appreciable tear in the bedspread of normality. Nothing like this:
I did not know whether I was Alphonse or another. I only felt myself changed and believed myself another me; I looked for myself in myself and did not find myself.I've almost always known I wasn't Alphonse - though I have occasionally woken up from the deepest sleep not really knowing anything much. If you're wondering what the point of this post is, don't let it worry you. Sometimes a person can scan the news and feel the world is only to be approached obliquely, if at all.