* Henri Michaux, a contemporary of Huxley’s who also wrote about his psychedelic experiences, took a very different tact, refusing the offer of metaphor to make sense of something he believed was beyond comprehension. In his book Miserable Miracle, he aimed to be “attentive to what’s going on—as it is—without trying to deform it and imagine it otherwise in order to make it more interesting to me.” Or sensible to his readers: the book is intermittently brilliant but for long stretches unreadable. “I had no longer any authority over words. I no longer knew how to manage them. Farewell to writing!” I know what he means, but I’ve elected to resist, even if that means tolerating some measure of deformation in my account.