I free-associated the way Dr. Strauss told me to do when I remember my dreams. Think about the dream and just (1) let my mind wander until (2) other thoughts come up in my mind. I keep on doing that until my mind (3) goes blank. Dr. Strauss says that it means (4) I’ve reached a point (5) where my subconscious is trying to block my conscious from remembering. It’s a wall between the present and the past. Sometimes the wall stays up and sometimes it breaks down and I can remember what’s behind it.

Somehow, getting drunk had momentarily broken down the conscious barriers that kept the old Charlie Gordon hidden deep in my mind. As I suspected all along, he was not really gone. Nothing in our minds is ever really gone. The operation had covered him over with a veneer of education and culture, but emotionally he was there-watching and waiting.

But I’ve discovered that (1) not only did Charlie exist in the past, he exists now. In me and around me. [...] I thought (2) my intelligence created the barrier - my pompous, foolish pride, the feeling we had nothing in common because I had gone beyond you. [...] But that’s not it. It’s Charlie, the little boy who’s afraid of women because of things his mother did to him. Don’t you see? All these months while I’ve been growing up intellectually, I’ve still had (3) the emotional wiring of the childlike Charlie. And every time I came close to you, or thought about making love to you, there was a short circuit.

“Then your patient could come in at each session and say, ‘A little off the top of my anxiety, please,’ or ‘Don’t trim the super-ego too close, if you don’t mind’…"

Speeding, the atoms of my body hurtling away from each other. I grow lighter, less dense, and larger… larger... exploding outward into the sun. I am an expanding universe swimming upward in a silent sea.

When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness...

…you had the impression that someone had turned on a washing-machine or sucked you up in a gigantic vacuum. You drowned in music and pure cacophony.

I don’t know what it is. I’m so damned unhappy, I’m so mad, and I don’t know why I feel like I’m putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I’ve been saving up a lot of things, and don’t know what.

It was not a matter of dark rooms, or one-winged agonizing angels, or long corridors, or nightmare mirrors with reflections overflowing in messy pools on the floor--it was not that (1) bedchamber of horrors, but simply, and far more horribly, a certain (2) insidious and relentless connection with other states of being which were not exactly “previous” or “future”, but definitely out of bounds, mortally speaking.

(1) The forefeel of fame was as heady as the old wines of nostalgia. (2) It was remembrance in reverse, a great lakeside oak reflected so picturesquely in such clear waters that (2a) its mirrored branches looked like glorified roots. I (3 – метафороподобное выражение без переносного смысла) felt this future fame in my toes, in the tips of my fingers, in the hair of my head, as one feels the shiver caused by an electric storm, by the dying beauty of a singer’s dark voice just before the thunder, or by one line in King Lear.

Why do tears blur my glasses when I (1) invoke that phantasm of fame as it tempted and tortured me then, five decades ago? Its image was innocent, its image was genuine, (2) its difference from what actually was to be breaks my heart like the pangs of separation.

…mentally, with my eyes closed and my body immobile, I am unable to switch from one direction to the other. (1) Some swivel cell in my brain does not work. I can cheat, of course, by (2) setting aside the mental snapshot of one vista and leisurely selecting the opposite view for my walk back to my starting point. But if I do not cheat, some kind of atrocious obstacle, which would drive me mad if I persevered, prevents me from imagining the twist which transforms one direction into another, directly opposite. I am crushed, I am carrying the whole world on my back in the process of trying to visualize my turning around and making myself see in terms of “right” what I saw in terms of “left” and vice versa...