In this state all is noise and chaos and devoid of meaning. It is difficult to imagine: our lives are so much more made up of light and sound and thoughts and feelings that form meaningful patterns and which help us to make sense of our lives and may grant us pleasure. The patient experiencing a psychotic episode is robbed of these harmonies. We cannot know the mind of another, and certainly not the mind of a psychotic other, but we can imagine that such noise, such a dissolution of meaning, would be intolerable. In this context it becomes understandable that a person in such a state should urgently seek to find or construct meanings and, in this process, to employ themes that are culturally or spiritually familiar - albeit often in deeply strange ways, given the disorder of mind.

I was fascinated by place because no place had ever belonged to me; nor had I ever belonged to any place. That was also why, as a child, I was fascinated by the body. Perhaps, I thought, I could belong inside my own body. Perhaps I could know the streams of the veins in my wrists the way other people knew the streams in which they swam as children. Perhaps I could know the names of the bones in the back of my hand the way other people knew the names of the back roads that were shortcuts home. I could know the rhythm of my pulse like my friend Dan knew the rhythm of the approaching train in his hometown, the rhythm he woke up to and went to sleep to and hoped would lead him somewhere else someday. I never did get to know my body that way.

Precisely the place to which our eulogist finally puzzles her way: her own mixed feelings. First she sees that she has them. Then she acknowledges them to herself. Then she considers them as a way into the experience. Then she realizes they are the experience. She begins to write.

Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard, hard work.

The reader realizes that the man who’s using turtles as a stand-in for human intimacy has been there from the very beginning. He tells us clearly enough: He had grown up loving all the animals, expecting to live in peace with his fellow creatures. But the developers had just kept coming. And the creature within had become entombed in the mud. Yet he, like the turtle, had survived: cold, quiet, alert. Containing within himself not multitudes but a sufficiency of response just large enough to avoid the charge of unnatural.

It is Hoagland’s complexity—the intentness of his observation coupled with the elegance of his withdrawal—that gives this essay its inner life. His mixed feelings provide the texture, and the drama. Patiently and “quietly,” they lead us into the starkness of solipsism. The turtles have taught the narrator that nothing outside himself is quite real to him.

The writing continues to dazzle while the structure falls apart. And rightly so. Because, after all, what difference does it really make—the second and third times around—which comes first? We are in the presence of a man in a trance of self-analysis: a man who will never act on what he knows and therefore is compelled to go on “knowing.