“Softening the Edges”

“In Skylar, as in Yak, the smoke produced an astonishingly pleasant, formerly unknown condition of repose. His plank bed grew downy; straight edges arced and wobbled; black and white began to vibrate with colors of spectral variety. Time, which had always marched in soldierly cadence, clip-clopping and tick-tocking its way forward in sheer linearity, threw down its rucksack, stopped in place, and began to perform somersaults. Objects ceased to pretend to be simply names relegated to mental filing cabinets, instead unleashing wave upon wave of self-descriptive information. Addiction to speech disappeared in the rhapsody of silence. The senses, once taken for granted and indulged unthinkingly, manifested keenness, sharpness, and intensity heretofore unimaginable. But the most unexpected and certainly most important effect of the high was an effluence of love: an upsurge of tender feeling toward the people and objects in the environment. Friends became as dear as if they were one’s children or one’s first childhood puppy. The well-defined, hard, and impenetrable fortifications enclosing each person dissolved and their inmost essence seeped out, to intermingle with his own, in an act amounting to spiritual incest in the family of man, a soul-intimacy whispered of by saints and poets and longed for by lovers but feared by society as a dangerous breakdown in the discreteness of its member particles.”