From the French-window I walked out under a kind of pergola covered in part by a climbing rose tree, in part by laths, one inch wide with half an inch of space between them. The sun was shining and the shadows of the laths made a zebra-like pattern on the ground and across the seat and a back of a garden chair, which was standing at this end of the pergola. That chair--shall I ever forget it?

Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep, but glowing, indigo alternated with stripes of an incandescence so intensely bright that, it was hard to believe that they could be made of anything but fire. For what seemed an immensely long time, I gazed, dumbly, without knowing, without wishing to know. At any other time, I would have see a chair barred with alternate light and shade. Today, the precept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstuck, that I could not be aware of anything else.

Garden furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow--these were no more than names and notions, mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event. The event was the succession of azure furnace-doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly wonderful; wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. For a brief period, I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad. Schizophrenia has its heavens and its infernos, purgatories. I remember what an old friend, dead these many years, told me about his made wife.

On day, in the early stages of the disease, when seh still had her lucid intervals, he had gone to the hospital to talk to her about their children. She listened for a time, then cut him short. How could he bear to waste his time on a couple of absent children, when all that really mattered, here and now, was the unspeakable beauty of the pattern she made, in his brown tweed jacket, every time he moved his arm?

Alas.

The paradise of cleansed perception, of pure, on-sided contemplation, was not to endure. The blissful intermissions became rarer, briefer, until finally, there were no more of them--only horror.

Most takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of the mental plague. The drug brings hell and purgatory only to those who have a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer episodes of anxious depression. If, like the other drugs of remotely comparable power, mescalin were notoriously toxic, the taking of it would be enough, in itself, to cause anxiety. But, the reasonably healthy person knows in advance that, so far as he is concerned, mescalin is completely innocuous, that its effects will pass after eight or ten hours, leaving behind it no hangover; even more, no craving for its renewal. Fortified by this knowledge, he embarks upon the experiment without fear--in other words, without any pre-disposition to convert an unprecedentedly strange and other human experience into something appalling, something actually diabolical.

Confronted by the chair, which looked like the Last Judgement--or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgement, which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair--I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going to far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyze in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.

None too soon, I was steered away from the disquieting splendors of my garden chair. Drooping in green parabolas from the hedge, the ivy fronds shone with a kind of glassy, jade-like radiance. A moment later, a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision. So passionately alive, they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance, flowers strained upwards into the blue. Like the chair under the laths, they protested too much. I looked down at the leaves and discovered a cavernous intricacy of the most delicate lights and shadows, pulsing with undecipherable mystery.

Roses:
The flowers are easy to paint,
The leaves difficult.

Shiki's haiku (which I quote in F.H. Blyth's translation) expresses, by indirection, exactly what I then felt--the excessive, too obvious glory of the flowers, as contrasted with the subtler miracle of their foliage.