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Show 24 Daniel was at that time studying medicine, and so John put the issue to him as a medical problem, yet he also described his experience in visionary terms: . . . the forest trees seemed to be running round in a circle chase and all the streams by the roadside seemed to be running uphill. He was experiencing a new and strange reality, where Nature flowed in patterns which transcended scientific laws of regulated time and space. He was seeing strangely. He was leaving the world of machines and entering a mystical perspective, though scarcely yet aware of it. He was radically transformed by his five day stay at Bonaventure, but he was not joyous. On the contrary- even later, after he had received letters and money, even after he had celebrated with a "jubilee of bread," he found himself melancholy. On October 15, when he reached Florida, he was out of sympathy with Nature. . . . not a mark of friendly recognition, not a breath, not a spirit whisper of sympathy came from anything about me, and of course I was lonely. And so he tried to account for his morbid, melancholy state of mind. Perhaps it was due to his "starving unfriended condition" the week before at Bonaventure. He was unreasonably apprehensive about alligators, and a noise behind him, made by a tall white crane, "handsome as a minister from spirit land," made him fancy his own demise in the jaws of death. He responded to this unhealthy state of mind with as much |
