The chills she’d felt rippling along her arms, the helium-like insurrection that announced, You are encountering beauty, had something to do with empathy, she felt, the dissolution of the borders of oneself, the merging of her consciousness with the incomprehensibly vast reservoir of others. Yes, consciousness, that was the element, like water or air, that she dissolved into, not only Ovid’s but infinite throngs of others. Tessa had felt so transformed by this mystical experience that when Daphne suddenly sprouted roots and foliage it had seemed logical. “And that’s when I knew I would not
...more
