Free The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris

are doing. It is absolutely disk-like, giving no impression of sphericity at all. It has another quality I have noticed all morning and which seems to me significant. Perhaps through some kind of physiological reaction, an irritation of the retina, its surface gives an impression of crawling slightly, the areas of deeper red shifting slowly to this or that part of the disk. I am deeply attached to the sun. I regard it as divine, life-giving, and ominous. That I am deliberately fleeing from it now, I the sun-devout Scandinavian-that in the middle of summer I should be fleeing northward to hide from its warmth around the bulge of the earth-is in itself significant. Does the sun know what I am doing? Undoubtedly. There it is, crawling redly, immobile, watching.

13 July 1897

    A n hour ortwo past midnight. In the polar twilight, a hazy and indistinct grey with tinges of pink, I am asleep or am I? it doesn’t matter, I am aware perhaps of the creaking of ropes and the gentle breathing of my companions and yet at the same time another part of me moves in other places, unreal and yet far more solid in their myriad form and texture than this insubstantial particle of reality in which I am suspended half-asleep from a globe of hydrogen in a sea of frozen air. In this other consciousness into which I slip deeper now and then as one might descend lazily into a bath of tepid water, a bath that calls and attracts with its warmth and yet to which one cannot surrender totally and immerse one’s being for more than a few instants since breathing is not possible in that violet and soporific fluid, in this deeper consciousness the objects are hard, vivid, piercing, all the more hard and vivid for their very unreality. The word
sleep
is greatly too simple to describe this state. At one end, toward the surface, it merges into daydreaming; at the deeper extreme, if one were to sink to the bottom, it is death. But the soul knows how to preserve itself. It drifts at a nice depth, now descending a little and now rising to touch the surface, in the manner of those sea creatures who must breathe air and yet whose nourishment lies deep. I hope I shall not snag myself on a telegraph cable down there. Inside the skin coat, when I awaken and only drowse a little, there is a smell of reindeer hair and tar, a comforting pungence, I am quite warm in this tent I have made by pulling my arms inside the coat. Doubled until the knees approach my chest, the hood over my face, I am enclosed in animal content. In the moments when I sink lower, toward fullsleep, a curious phenomenon takes place. A part of my body, mistaken about the circumstances or perhaps responding to some private reality of its own, awakens and stirs toward a goal. In the vividness of its imagination this part of me thinks of, invents, or conjectures its mirror image in another similar and yet importantly different organism, a concavity to match its convexity. The stupid brutal thing is not a whit discouraged at not finding this concavity; it goes on yearning in its stiff and mindless way, exciting itself with its own thumping heart. In my moments of half wakefulness I am inclined to be ironic about this delusion this fifth limb of mine seems to have fallen into. And yet is it not strange and curious that a part of me, a part of my consciousness even though a lower and coarser part, should mistake a portion of reindeer skin in this way for the embrace of a yearned-for and beloved companion! And stranger still that only a single scrap of membrane, of all the animal substance in the universe, should be the one this fine nerve of mine should desire to touch—that it should be so exigent, so obsessedly selective, and yet so easily deluded. It is only in the wakened state that the body makes fine distinctions. Asleep or half-asleep it is ready to settle for the shabbiest simulacrum. Fold of reindeer hide or whatever, beloved one, this blind snake tightened in an arc is your adorer! What