My dear Doctor, I place myself in your hands. Do with me what you like. I am going to tell you my state of mind very frankly, and you will judge whether it isn’t better to have me taken care of for a little while in a sanatorium, rather than leave me prey to the hallucinations and sufferings that are plaguing me. Here’s the story, lengthy and precise, of the singular illness of my soul. I was living like everybody else, looking at life with the open, blind eyes of man, without surprise and without understanding. I was living as animals live, as we all live, carrying out all the duties of existence, examining and thinking I saw, thinking I knew, thinking I was familiar with, my surroundings, when one day I perceived that everything is false. It was a phrase from Montesquieu that suddenly illumined my thinking. Here it is: “One more organ or one less in our body would give us a different intelligence. In fact, all the established laws as to why our body is a certain way would be different if our body were not that way.”
