and placing a hand on its flank, feeling the blood-warmth beneath the soft skin of the land, the dense and heaving muscle, the quiet aliveness of the earth itself. I wanted to curl up beside the mountain as though it were an old dog, to lay my arm across its back, and press my face softly into its side, and sleep.
* * *
—
I awoke early the next morning, having slept more soundly than I’d expected. I considered packing up my tent, as much for something to do as anything else, but quickly decided against it, figuring I had a further five hours or so to go until the solo ended at midday, and not wanting to risk getting stuck out in the rain without shelter. The day was clear and warm now, but it was the highlands in spring, and you never knew what was in store from one hour of the day to the next. I sat and gazed at the mountain, which seemed farther away now than it had yesterday evening. The feeling of strange intimacy had receded somewhat, though I was aware of a residual affinity. It had been real, this feeling. It could not have been otherwise, in the sense that it was hardly possible to imagine you were feeling something you were not. I struggled to connect it with anything I had experienced before. The one thing it seemed related to, I thought, was a sense I had sometimes had in childhood, at the height of a fever, that the world was pressing in upon me, and that every sound I heard was an act of direct communication: that the closing of a door elsewhere in the house, the creaking of a floorboard, the flushing of a toilet, the distant sound of my mother and father talking—though not the words themselves, which were entirely irrelevant—were speaking directly to me, imparting an urgent and insistent message, but in a code that was completely beyond my ability to decipher. The experience was dreamlike, but at the same time almost unbearably intense, so that I feared I might dissolve entirely under the pressure of this onslaught of encrypted significance. Everything suddenly mattered absolutely, resonated with the urgency of its own being. It was an experience of equal terror and exhilaration.
This thing I had experienced the previous evening was different—less intense and urgent, for one thing, less literally feverish—but it had seemed to arise from a similar place, and to suggest a rupture of the boundary between myself and the world. Was this, I wondered, what Freud was referring to when he talked, in Civilization and Its Discontents, about what he called the “oceanic feeling”—the sense of the eternal, the limitless, the boundless? Freud could find no evidence of any such feeling in himself, nor the capacity to experience it, but this didn’t stop him from expanding on it at considerable length, based on the descriptions of his friend the French writer Romain Rolland. Rolland had told him that he himself was constantly experiencing this feeling, which was, Freud wrote, “a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; no assurance of personal immortality attached to it, but it was the source of the religious energy that was seized upon by the various churches and religious systems, directed into particular channels and certainly consumed by them. On the basis of this oceanic feeling alone one was entitled to call oneself religious, even if one rejected every belief and every illusion.” Freud himself did not agree with Rolland that this oceanic feeling was in fact the source of all religious sentiment. I don’t suppose I would describe my experience as religious, either, or even spiritual. There didn’t seem to be anything magical about it, so much as it was a kind of insight into the aliveness of the world.
I had practiced meditation on and off over the last few years, and, while there had been frankly diminishing returns with respect to general mindfulness and well-being, it did occasionally have the effect of creating a mood of immersion in the sensory experience of sound, relieving me for a time of my relentless interiority, and cultivating something like Freud’s feeling of the oceanic. And so, sitting in front of my tent, I had closed my eyes and slowed my breathing and was striving to focus on the sensation of air filling and evacuating my lungs, and was attuning myself to the heterogeneous sounds of the wilderness—the distant elated whoop of