An intoxicating joy ran through him, lifted him up, and it was incomparably sweeter than the world’s sweetest pain. This was it, this was the drunken darkness that had filled him since the afternoon, this was what had stirred in his heart in the middle of the night, awakening him, quickening like first love within him. And in being granted this understanding and realization—not in words and sequential thoughts, but in the sudden bliss of internal illumination—he was already free, was truly liberated from all natural and artificial bonds and barriers.
