They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived.
What a coincidence, this passage, after reading Huxley's Heaven and Hell. He applies the word preternatural often in the context of altered experiences, under the influence of mescalin, acid, or ascetic fasting, and dread. The same observation of the sharpening of senses comes up here.
Note: i picked up this book, referred by Leonard Shlain's Art and Physics, from the Literary chapter, on how writers like Dostoyevsky applied a stretching of time, a slow motion in prose.
