[...] I was already aware of a great Somethingness that was at work in the world. The signs were everywhere: the way I saw symphonies of color when I closed my eyes to think; the way ocean tides felt sentient, like a creature to whose moods I submitted my body; the discovery that air looks invisible but a bright light beamed in a dark room reveals millions of particles swirling.

I finally picked up Fear and Trembling when I was maybe twenty-five and living in New York. I had a lot of free hours to read at the time, and I was in the mood for existentialism - I'd lately experienced one of the radical life upheavals that tend to happen when you're twenty-five. Instead of getting engaged, my boyfriends of five years and I had broken up and moved out, and my future, my home life, my social circle, my reading, my time were up for reinvention. I quit my job and moved uptown and started going to classes with people who worked for hours on a single sentence and talked about devoting themselves to catching inspiration and channeling it into book form. I'd been working a corporate job; now I had a friend who put on a three-piece suit before sitting down at his desk to write, out of respect for the Muse. In a span of eighteen months, my life had grown unrecognizable.

I was happy and I was also burning up with questions, walking around New York, looking for a sign. [...] I waited for the real moment when I'd know what to build a life on and how to be. It didn't come. I looked around: most people seemed to be waiting, too, though they rarely used terms like "epiphany" or "conviction". I waited some more.

Even with clocks, the subway seems to hover outside of time, a "heterotopia," or a space that exists beyond the reach of normal human systems and social mores.

This is an entire subgenus of subway passenger, the one who uses the purgatory of platforms and crowded cars to explain how they were saved p..]

[...] I appreciate the acknowledgement that on the average Tuesday morning most people are waiting in more than one way: waiting to get to their stop, but also waiting for news, for inspiration, for intervention, for a promotion, for a diagnosis, for breakfast. THe pamphleteers understand that all suspended desire, in some sense, feels the same.

[...] The people at this church were lit from behind their eyes. They seemed to be moved by the joy of a single certainty, like a cedar tent pole planted in a field, stillness at the center of swaying silk. As much as I insisted that I was no longer one of them, there was an echo of myself I was remembering by sitting in church, and I needed to stay close it. [...]

People often use the word "ecstasy" when talking about being in the presence of divinity, a word whose root, ekstasis, means to stand outside oneself, to be beside oneself, beyond oneself. Lying there, contemplating my knobbly ceiling, I was comically inside myself. I thought something might come from outside me and penetrate to my deepest bones, to shoot wisdom into me or wrench a doubt out of me. Swoop in here, I told the ceiling knob, give me something to work with. Please, please call.

No one called. Nothing happened. It was just me, obediently talking to the ceiling.