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Only in a moment’s self-reflecting ecstasy can I forget: life is a never-ending oscillation between pain and pleasure. Sometimes I get motion sickness.
The movement seems slow but the changes are sudden. One moment I am sitting on a couch consumed by a depression that growls in the bowels of my being, and then I exhale a quick prayer or recall the ripple of a smile across her face—and the waves have receded, the clouds have cleared, and the night’s gnawing hunger has been spontaneously transformed into the dazzling infinity of the first day of summer.
Or else the other way. An unconscious harmony underlines every word I speak, every itch I scratch, every sound that breaks on my melodious ear. The world is for once a perfect sphere, the people so perfectly proportioned across its spinning surface that the revolution breaks into a divine balance. And suddenly, the tower, built so high and so steadily that my conscious attention had never rested on it, topples down; children scream, mothers mumble drunken diaries at a cluttered kitchen table, and Satan falls again onto the fragile world, breaking and bending anew all my clever constructions.