Sleep was key to thought, and to intellectual development. As man’s thoughts became ever more complex, the longer he needed to sleep. The longer man slept, Bruno said, the more he dreamed, and the more penetrating and wondrous his waking thought became.

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He felt like the disappointing outlier on a Venn diagram, forgotten, eliminated when the data was collected and the average calculated. He didn't exist.

He felt like the face on the back of a coin being tossed in the air. It could go either way, but the whole thing had a bitter taste of destiny to it, as if the coin had already landed and everybody else knew the result.

By opening yourself to the cold nasty current of disintegration and discouragement that runs six inches beneath the surface of existence, you make yourself available to that other, deeper current: the one that warms and heartens and shapes and sustains. It's right there. It knows who you are. And on the far side of despair, it will reach for you.

Attention," writes the neurophilosopher Iain McGilchrist, "is not just another 'function' alongside other cognitive functions. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things. The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the very nature of the world in which those 'functions' would be carried ou

Those knobs or wads of used gum, with their genital shapes—they're tiny monuments to contemplation, really. Each one memorializes a distinct passage of mind. The thoughts are flown, but the gum remains. Get it on your shoe, wrap it round your heart, and think of me.

Reality drizzles, then pours in. Greyness floods the skylights of the mind.

"There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library."