[Prestidigitweeze]

Have you ever read someone whose ability to articulate the spiritual intensity of perception altered your way of experiencing the world? If so, who were they and which of their books or pieces first drew you out of your daze?

Virginia Woolf was mine, The Waves was the novel, and this is the passage that changed my sensory input forever:

"The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A knife was like a white lake. A plate looked like a dagger of ice. Tables and chairs rose to the surface as if they had been sunk under water and rose again, filmed with red, orange, purple like the bloom on the skin of ripe fruit. The veins on the glaze of the china, the grain of the wood, the fibers of the matting became more and more finely engraved. Everything was without shadow. A jar was so green that the eye seemed sucked up through a funnel by its intensity and clung to it like a limpet. Then shapes took on mass and edge. Here was the boss of a chair; here the bulk of a cupboard. And as the light increased, flocks of shadow were driven before it and conglomerated and hung in many-pleated folds in the background."

-- Virginia Woolf, The Waves