It felt as if the lake and the woods and the cabin all merged into one.
Soon it seemed that everything she saw was one person, and that person
was Sophie herself. She glanced up at Alberto, but he too seemed to be part
of Sophie’s soul.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” she said. “Everything looks like it did before,
but now it’s all one thing. I feel as if everything is one thought.”
Alberto nodded—but it seemed to Sophie that it was she nodding to
herself.
“It is Pantheism or Idealism,” he said. “It is the Romantics’ world spirit.
They experienced everything as one big ‘ego.’ It is also Hegel—who was
critical of the individual, and who saw everything as the expression of the one
and only world reason.”
“Should I drink from the other bottle too?”
“It says so on the label.”
Sophie took the cap off the blue bottle and took a large gulp. This juice
tasted fresher and sharper than the other. Again everything around her
changed suddenly.
Instantly the effects of the red bottle disappeared and everything slid
back to its normal place. Alberto was Alberto, the trees were back in the
woods and the water looked like a lake again.
But it only lasted for a second, because things went on sliding away from
each other. The woods were no longer woods and every little tree now
seemed like a world in itself. The tiniest twig was like a fairy-tale world about
which a thousand stories could be told.
The little lake suddenly became a boundless ocean— not in depth or
breadth, but in its glittering detail and the intricate patterns of its waves.
Sophie felt she might spend a lifetime staring at this water and to her dying
day it would still remain an unfathomable mystery.
She looked up at the crown of a tree. Three little sparrows were
engrossed in a curious game. Was it hide-and-seek? Sophie had known in a
way that there were birds in this tree, even after she had drunk from the red
bottle, but she had not really seen them properly. The red juice had erased all
contrasts and all individual differences.
Sophie jumped down from the large flat stone step they were standing
on and bent over to look at the grass. There she discovered another new
world—like a deep-sea diver opening his eyes under water for the first time. In
amongst the twigs and straws of grass, the moss was teeming with tiny
details. Sophie watched a spider make its way over the moss, surefooted and
purposeful, a red plant louse running up and down a blade of grass, and a
whole army of ants laboring in a united effort in the grass. But each tiny ant
moved its legs in its own particular manner.
The most curious of all was the sight that met her eyes when she stood
up again and looked at Alberto, still standing on the front step of the cabin. In
Alberto she now saw a wondrous person—he was like a being from another
planet, or an enchanted figure out of a fairy tale. At the same time she
experienced herself in a completely new way as a unique individual. She was
more than just a human being, a fifteen-year-old girl. She was Sophie
Amundsen, and only she was that.
“What do you see?” asked Alberto.
“I see that you’re a strange bird.”