136/3 The sense of touch is round in the thumb, more and more oval from ring to index finger, until it ends on the point of a needle in the little finger.

137/2 The act of love is a mental and physical birth-and-death sensation, not in parallel juxtaposition but wound together as if in a tourniquet--wound so tightly that you can't possibly tell whether it's a birth or death you're living through.

137/3 The act of love is the greatest of all Symposiums, where you drink everything to the dregs and feel the thrill of it from head to toe. That is why it's so disorienting afterward. You no longer feel as if you had been drinking but that you, yourself, had been drained to the last drop.

138/2 At the point of death the dying man feels himself simultaneously ending one life and beginning another as if he were a child at the instant of leaping over a hedge, one leg on either side. The timelessness of the act of love puts us astride of life itself.

138/4 With your eyes wide open the space in front of you seems larger than the space behind you. Close your eyes and it feels just the opposite. Meanwhile, space alongside you seems smaller than any other kind. The reason is that the human face is the Pole of
Light and the human back the Pole of Darkness, and night or day you can never see on both sides of your body.

138/6 When the wind blows, plants growing in the cracks between rocks shiver like babies and shake like old people. Their sensitivity to wind is like the emotional crumbling under stress of a cool manner concealing a warm heart or the cold sweat of a tropical fever when burning lava seems to be flowing through icy nerves.

139/3 If we keep our eyes wide open at the peak of sexual
pleasure, the extreme dilation of our ocular fibres makes us see each other's face as spherical. The twosome vision of our conjunction doubles the volume.

142/1 Life is a passageway between birth at one end and death at the other. There is no other way out of life's prison. The act of love is an attempt to find a side exit by shaking the walls, a vain attempt to return to its divine origin by some service staircase.

142/3 Darkness dies towards dawn like a series of curtains, each one parting to reveal another behind it. Darkness at twilight is a black curtain that keeps moving Westward.

142/4 The white of the eye in penumbra is the loveliest moonlight of all.

142/5 If it were not for the fact that in stages one part of the eye is always telling us something while the other part listens, the ear would have to do all the listening on its own and live night and day in the noisy streets of sound. We would be unable to hear our own thoughts amid the hellish clamor. Thinking would become obsolete.

144/2 The plane of the rainbow is always at right angles to our view of it, whether we go directly up to it or look at it from an angle. The rainbow keeps ahead of our view of it and turns when we turn. God is always right there in front of us.

144/5 When we walk, the lower part of our body wriggles somewhat like a fish and the upper part like the jerky movements of a bird always just about to fly off and then "changing its mind" like
the way a top would keep changing its spin on slightly hilly ground as it pours out and drinks the air on both sides of its spooling-out body.

145/2 Yellow is closer to divine respiration than any other color. Colors with yellow in them breathe more easily than others. Notice in a fire how more easily orange-red breathes than flaming red , and even moreso orange-yellow than scarlet. Green breathes more freely than blue because the yellow in it helps dilate its lungs. We breathe more freely looking at the greenness around us than up at the azure sky.

145/4 Our sense of touch is in essence the search for the deepest ruts and pits on the wide plains of the skin. The hand stops short and the arm tightens whenever the fingers find what they are looking for.

145/5 When serenity takes us over it cradles our eyes into a faintly rocking look.

146/2 Where there's light there's sound--the two are inseparable. Color has timbre as well as tone. All over a human body the color may look the same, but the timbre varies according to the kind of body part: form gives color its timbre. The flute of the underarm. The drums of the buttocks. The clarinet of the forearm. The saxophone wail of the upper thigh. Clothing clicking castanets against the knees. The oboe of the neck. The bust is a xylophone played by the padded felt hammers of the breasts. The forms of the human body bring its color to life and orchestrate all its hues and shades on a scale of infinite possibilities.

146/5 Certain kinds of anguish are so bewildering and disorienting that for a time you lose all control over the timbre and tone of your own voice. It would seem to have disowned you completely. If in his dying agony a poor soul were to find his voice articulating words clearly, they would sound otherworldly, a tongue so incredibly foreign one couldn't possibly imagine what moon or planet they were coming from.

147/5 A hollow in the physical world is a cavity. A hollow in the psychic world is an inverted swelling swallowed up by matter.

147/7 The eyelashes are our eyes' radio antennae. Full lashes help us mix color and sound at a distance. Slightly lowered lashes flatten and fade faraway colors. Our lashes serve us as chromatic telescopes.

148/2 Eyebrows in the angular shape of a circumflex accent put donkey caps on our vision. Stupidity's angular V-like look is the stamp it leaves on the eye, the mark of a mental opening too narrow to let in ideas.

148/5 The tree trunk is the only form in nature that looks at you both in profile and full face at the same time because it has to accommodate itself to the thousands of "angles of view" of its leaves. If the tree trunk looked at you only in full face, the tree's jumble of foliage would seem to be squinting, which would create a devastating effect on your vision, eventually "crippling" your eyesight.

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