FOREWORD
Did you ever have a notion of this kind—there is an orange, or say an apple, lying on a table before you. You put out your hand to take it. Perhaps you eat it, make it a part of your physical life. Have you touched? Have you eaten? That’s what I wonder about.
The whole subject is only important to me because I want the apple. What subtle flavors are concealed in it—how does it taste, smell, feel? Heavens, man, the way the apple feels in the hand is something—isn’t it?
For a long time I thought only of eating the apple. Then later its fragrance became something of importance too. The fragrance stole out through my room, through a window and into the streets. It made itself a part of all the smells of the streets. The devil!—in Chicago or Pittsburgh, Youngstown or Cleveland it would have had a rough time.
That doesn’t matter.
The point is that after the form of the apple began to take my eye I often found myself unable to touch at all. My hands went toward the object of my desire and then came back.
There I sat, in the room with the apple before me, and hours passed. I had pushed myself off into a world where nothing has any existence. Had I done that, or had I merely stepped, for the moment, out of the world of darkness into the light?
It may be that my eyes are blind and that I cannot see.
It may be I am deaf.
My hands are nervous and tremble. How much do they tremble? Now, alas, I am absorbed in looking at my own hands.
With these nervous and uncertain hands may I really feel for the form of things concealed in the darkness?