Reading Huxley’s account while quarantined in a pandemic intensified my desire to try mescaline. The idea that a molecule could somehow deepen or expand the scope of one’s reality suggested a mental strategy nicely tailored to the situation. I was reminded of the lovely line Shakespeare gave Hamlet, enduring a different kind of claustrophobia: “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.” Mescaline might offer a way to do that, not as a means of escape from circumstance, but as an expansion of it. Instead of an alternate reality, it promised infinitely more of
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