Once in a while, I get shocked into upper wakefulness, I turn a corner, see the ocean, and my heart tips over with happiness – it feels free! Then I have the idea that, as well as beholding, I can also be beheld from yonder and am not a discrete object, but incorporated with the rest, with universal sapphire, purplish blue. For what is this sea, this atmosphere, doing within the eight-inch diameter of your skull? (I say nothing of the sun and galaxy which are also there.) At the very center of the beholder there must be space for the whole, and this nothing-space is not an empty nothing, but a nothing reserved for everything. You can feel this nothing-everything capacity with ecstasy, and this is what I actually felt in the jet. Sipping whisky, feeling the radiant heat that rose inside, I experienced a bliss that I knew perfectly well was not mad.

-Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift