An imaginative glimpse into the mind of someone losing his grip on reality.
The sound of nickels dropping underfoot, lost to the crowds of unrecognizable men – this is what you recall as you sit in the empty room and tap your foot with anxious unease.
How can the sound reverberate so clearly? you ask. How, in the millions of memories collected in your cells, does this particular detail – a sliver of an observation, barely worth remembering – rise to the surface and assert itself so insistently?
You find yourself frantic and bored, bored and frantic, conflicting energies tied up and rallying in your soul. Well, not your soul, you think, but some lesser part – maybe your body, or your mind.
The soul contains an infinitude of peace, you think, and you vaguely attempt to protect the purity of such a notion by stilling your foot and ceasing the tap-tap-tap.
But still, you wonder, what is the point of distilling all these thoughts? You mustn’t go crazy, or everything will go dark.
You must control the impulse to abandon all hope of making sense – and instead remind yourself of things that are tangible, concrete.
The abstractions will spell the end of you, if you’re not careful enough. You know how simple it is to get lost in a question, a mere arrangement of words and ideas.
You must remember, then, to anchor yourself to something the senses can perceive – something your neighbor could drop by and affirm the existence of with a nod of his head and a muttered, “Well, yes, of course, I see it, too.”
But then, remember, also, that your senses deceive. You remember how you were fooled into thinking something was beautiful when it wasn’t? So what are you going to do, ill-equipped as you are to sort out truth from fancy?
You will need to phone a friend – tap into the wisdom of someone whose sensibilities are screwed in a little more tightly than yours.
But whom will you call? The bridge of information exchange is hard to cross. You need to trust that this person will understand your perceptions, even as he holds fast to his own, sturdier way of seeing the world.
Does such a person exist? A dreamer’s soul in a pragmatist’s body? You will need to comb your thoughts for inspiration. The number of acquaintances who suggest themselves to you is frighteningly small.
But the need for verification is intense, is of the utmost importance in this hour when everything seems to have gone strange. Will you break through to the light? Will you climb back to safe terrain where your perceptions are sane and the things you see are full of sturdy, unbending, unobjectionable, inviolable sense…?