“Night Walk”

“The boy ended up walking all night. But it didn’t seem like a long time to him; in fact, it didn’t seem like any time at all. For he had forgotten about time that night. He had simply allowed his consciousness to float out of his body and blend intimately with the hushing exsufflations of the woods, the paleness of the barely lit night, and the aspiration of the depthless heavens, which not only pulled him into themselves but also stretched him out indefinitely, regardless of direction or distance. Utterly lost in the word’s normal sense of having no sensory inputs as to his path or immediate surroundings, Gilberto found himself in a dimension that was grander both in physical scope and transcendental meaning. A normal boy of his age, walking on such a road at such an hour, would have been vaguely frightened and certainly intimidated by the absence of other people and the blackness of the night. But that would have been a result of his identifying himself as simply a body on a nearly invisible road. Gilberto, on the contrary, experienced himself as a spirit of unbounded perimeter, a subtle essence that spread out far beyond his small body to and through the most distant reaches of the universe.” (from “Palace of Perfect Wisdom”)