Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

“The inner world, the world of the mind, is a place of immense distances.”

Charles Watkins is lost at sea in his own head. Doctors see a sick patient. You see a man finally waking up to the scale of the universe.

“He had been a professor of Classics. Now he was a voyager.”

Living as a professor was just a costume he wore. He finds more truth in the weird myths of his dreams than in his real life. It makes me wonder what roles I am just playing.

“They were trying to pull him back into their own small, tidy world.”

The hospital staff wants him to be a person again. They mean a person who pays bills and remembers names. They do not care about the cosmic secrets he found.

His visions of the white disk and the city of light felt so heavy. He was part of something huge and ancient. Then the drugs bring him back to a boring room.