Blurred Lines

I CAME across the following quotation from Mark Twain:

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”

Twain’s observation reminds me of what T.S. Eliot said in The Four Quartets about becoming one with sound:

Music heard so deeply

that is not heard at all,

but you are the music

while the music lasts.

The French artist, Cézanne, also remarked that

“The landscape paints itself through me, and I am its consciousness.”

In other words, it is as though the rigid demarcation of duality is temporarily suspended and it is only when people return to their everyday, mundane lives that the subject-object dichotomy seems to return; i.e. the distance between ourselves and those things we find so meaningful being illusory.