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In Turner, there is a line, a line in which all opposites are reconciled.

..A sense of immersion in nature (Monet), a loss of identity, which heightens one's sense of being.

from K. Clark's Civilisation.

What is this loss, where one finds oneself, finds alone a sense of self to keep from the mirrors? Like colour, a pure sensation but also an order of the soul. Is the daily accumulation of it prefigured in our sleeping? Our absencing of ourselves, from ourselves? Taking leave. As if reality was too much for one, and not enough at the same time. In your dreams you can be anybody; and in your sleep you can be nobody.

This line, this line was once marked by shamans in caves; the porous border which allowed the spirit to escape, which allowed others to arrive. Art, as a way out, and not just a symbol of it to the mind.

And yet something in you recoils at this thought, anything approaching an ocenaic feeling; something pulls you back to the familiar world of dead routines, commitments, attachments: not Tillich's 'all truth is on the boundaries' or general Kashmiri laziness, but Ubo's simple and instinctive pragmatism: better to be late in this world than early in the next. And you don't have a mystical bone in you anyway! Reconciliation? Nah, too Jewish for that!

But the broken circles of our lives, like chains of light, glinting in the summer rain.

There is no way out of the song of gratitude and complaint.
As long as the wisp of breath exists, this harmony remains the same.
---Mir Dard.

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Does comedy in a novel take something away from it? A book that is genuinely funny: Spike, of course! Had you in splits. But Lorrie Moore, for instance. Jesus! Is this a woman thing? No, Cheever, for all his stylistic brilliance, is beginning to grate on your nerves with the slapstick.