You know you’re reading a great book when all of a sudden you’ll want to reach out through the pages to the author and say: YES! I know what you mean! That’s happened to me!

The passage I was reading is from What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt and it deals with a father talking to his 11-year-old son before he goes to bed. They’ve just been to a baseball game.

“You know Dad, I’m always thinking about how many people there are in the world. I was thinking about it between innings at the game, and I got this funny feeling, you know, how everybody is thinking thoughts at the same time, billions of thoughts.

“…And then I got this weird idea about how all those different people see what they see just a little different from everybody else.”

“You mean that every person has a different way of seeing the world?”

“No, Dad, I mean really and truly. I mean that because we were sitting where we were sitting tonight, we saw a game that was a little different from those guys with the beer next to us. It was the same game, but I could’ve noticed something those guys didn’t. And then I thought, if I was sitting over there, I’d see something else. And not just the game. I mean they saw me and I saw them, but I didn’t see myself and they didn’t see themselves. Do you get what I mean?”

“I know just what you mean. I’ve thought about it a lot, Matt. The place where I am is missing from my view. It’s like that for everybody. We don’t see ourselves in the picture, do we? It’s kind of a hole.”

“And then when I put that together with people thinking their zillions of thoughts - right now they’re out there thinking and thinking - I get this floaty feeling.”

This floaty feeling.

Yes! I gripped both sides of the book and shook it, as if doing so would somehow get the message across to the writer that I used to get that too.

Sometimes at night after lights were out, sometimes all alone in the forest, I could almost will it to happen. I didn’t even have to have my eyes closed. All I had to do was think of the world and everything that’s in it, every detail and that again on the moon, and the planets, and our galaxy and the clusters of galaxies beyond, and the outer reaches of the universe and all the dust motes in the infinity of space, and ask myself this: what if, instead of all this, there were nothing? What if right now, there were abolutely nothing? What if there were absolutely nothing at all, what if there never had been anything at all, and could there ever be nothing at all, and what if by defining this nothing as something, there were actually something anyway?

And while thinking this, I’d get this floaty feeling as if my body were drifting along in a current I couldn’t control. Sometimes it was accompanied by sounds, like rushing water or wind, other times it was like a piece of music, a string passage perhaps. Exactly what, I can’t recall, I just remember having the feeling.

I told some people about it over the years, but very few said they knew what I meant or had experienced it themselves.

Many years later, a girlfriend - a new-agey type who believed in chakras and energy fields and mysticism - said I was astral travelling, and that I was having an out-of-body experience.

Then again, she also spun tales of being on a mafia hit-list because she’d given the RCMP information that led to their busting a long-running heroin-smuggling operation out of Bangkok into Canada in the late 1980s and that’s why she had to leave Vancouver and go live in Montreal… Yeah right…

I hadn’t thought about it for ages before coming across that passage this morning, because by the time I was 13, I couldn’t do it anymore. I’d try to will it, I’d try to make that feeling come back, but it’s gone.

What was it? What killed it in me, and could I ever get it back again?

© 2008 lettershometoyou

PS: Taking that book to Paris. See you in 10 days or so.