Vitalic - Trahison
But even then, in the woods or the mountains or the desert, it would be difficult, he knew, to faithfully connect with what he was seeing and be able to perceive truly and clearly the reality of the natural world. Clear thinking was not guaranteed. Sometimes when driving in the countryside in northern California, above Nevada City, or even when he had been at the Finger Lakes in New York, he tried to imagine what the landscape would have looked like had he been the first person to see it, a millennium before, and it was impossible, he could never displace himself fully from the present, there was always a passing car, the ambient noise of people, an electrical tower in the distance, an overhead airplane to disrupt his line of thinking. Sometimes, particularly in places loaded with majesty and conducive to wonder, like Muir Woods, or the Grand Canyon, or Yellowstone, all of which he had visited, he had to remind himself that he was actually staring at a mountain, or a geyser, or a stand of redwoods—that it was real and he was sharing space with that feature, he was in the same air—and he had to push away the sneaky feeling that the scene in front of his eyes was merely a vivid slide, like in the View-Master toy he had as a child. That especially seemed to him an indication that something was wrong with him, when he had to convince himself that he was standing in Muir Woods, among the trees, near the ocean, by repeatedly thinking to himself, “I am in Muir Woods.”