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Jim Coe's avatar

Currently we have plenty of opportunities to practice our Viktor Frankl.

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Geoffrey Gevalt's avatar

This is a wonderful piece. And it is a great reminder to us that we really do rush. And do not stop. Do not notice. Do not breathe. I hope it's OK, but it brought to mind a part of my novel (being shopped by my agent) in which beforehand, I tried to imagine stopping. Completely. I tried to imagine dying and then waking up. Which, I guess, is an extreme example of what you are talking about, that is, that when we stop, when we really really stop, that is the time when we come to life, when we see what we hadn't seen, feel what we hadn't felt. That imagining led to this passage about a mysterious character that emerged from a typo (yes, that's true) and I imagined him waking:

"The man’s eyes open, close, open again. He sees only blackness. Feels only the vibration coming from the stone under his body. Hears only the sound of his eyelashes against the air, whoosh whoosh whoosh, a sensation more than a sound, like rubbing a peach against your cheek.

"His lips part, a pop softly as they separate, held together by the crust of being closed for so long.

It will be some time before he will see light, before what he sees shifts from vague shapes to more distinct forms illuminated only by the light filtering through the crack in the northwest corner of the cave’s ceiling.

"It will be some time before he hears sounds beyond that of the high-pitched ringing and low thrumming in his ears, a constant that envelops him. It will be some time before he makes out the sound of a single trail of moisture sliding down the wall, falling off a tiny precipice and landing on a clump of moss below, before he hears the footsteps of ants skittering across the floor of stone with its veins of gray and black and white and rust, before he hears the vibrations of the spider’s web as the spider spins another tendril at the top of the opening in the tunnel in which he lies. ..."

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