UNKNOWN

Much of life is spent on autopilot. In this vast percentage of our waking time, we are as somnambulists, externally moving about but internally thoroughly unmoved. Then there are the rare moments and experiences that take us out of that mundanity and thrust us into some other place. Here, experience is so intense that it encompasses evident contradictions—elated but melancholic, redeemed yet doomed, potent to the nth degree but more deeply aware than at any other moment of the fragile and delicate state of everything and of its unbearable yet exhilarating finitude, exploding with love for the entirety of creation but haughtily superior in the way of gods looking down on a fallen world.

The most central element of the experience is the feeling of being intoxicated with the hypnotic certainty that there exists nothing beyond what is present just then, and the triumph of the illusion that one will never, ever die. I have tried to write some of those sacred moments, to capture them in the bottle of magic that is writing, and to communicate them to others in a form that might evoke something of the experience itself.

Alexander Riley is a writer. He teaches at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.