perception and depersonalization and such (amiel and huxley)

"I can find no words for what I feel. My consciousness is withdrawn

into itself; I hear my heart beating, and my life passing. It seems to

me that I have become a statue on the banks of the river of time,

that I am the spectator of some mystery, and shall issue from it

old, or no longer capable of age. . . . I am, a spectator, so to speak,

of the molecular whirlwind which men call individual life; I am

conscious of an incessant metamorphosis; an irresistible movement

of existence, which is going on within me—and this phenomenology

of myself serves as a window opened upon the mystery of the

world. . . .

What is it which has always come between real life and me?

What glass screen has, as it were, interposed itself between me and

the enjoyment, the possession, the contact of things, leaving me

only the role of the looker-on? False shame, no doubt. I have been

ashamed to desire. Fatal results of timidity, aggravated by intellectual

delusion! Fear, too, has had a large share in it."

"Inadaptability, clue either to mysticism or stiffness, delicacy or

disdain, is the misfortune . . . the characteristic of my life. I have

not been able to fit myself to anything, to content myself with

anything. I have never had the quantum of illusion necessary for

risking the irreparable. I have made use of the ideal itself to keep

me from any kind of bondage. It was thus with marriage; only perfection

would have satisfied me; and, on the other hand, I was not

worthy of perfection. . . . So that, finding no satisfaction in things, I

tried to extirpate desire, by which things enslave us. Independence

has been my refuge; detachment my stronghold. I have lived the

impersonal life—in the world, yet not in it, thinking much, desiring

nothing. It is a state of mind which corresponds with what in

women is called a broken heart; and it is in fact like it, since the

characteristic common to both is despair. When one knows that

one will never possess what one could have loved, and that one

can be content with nothing less, one has, so to speak, left the

world, one has cut the golden hair, parted with all that makes human

life—that is to say, illusion—the incessant effort towards an

apparently attainable end."

"Since the age of 16 onwards I have been able to look at things

with the eyes of a blind man recently operated upon. That is to

say, I have been able to suppress in myself the results of the long

education of sight, and to abolish distances; and now I find myself

regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb, from another

world; all is strange to me; I am, as it were, outside my own body

and individuality; I am depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this

madness? No. Madness means the impossibility of recovering one's

normal balance after the mind has thus played truant among alien

forms of being, and followed Dante to invisible worlds. Madness

means incapacity for self-judgement and self-control. Whereas it

seems to me that my mental transformations are but philosophical

experiences."

Henri Frederic Amiel

"Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that

has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is

happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain

and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and

confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge.

. . . According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind

at Large."

Aldous Huxley