his usual instinct as a writer had been to seek narrative orderliness—to “always connect one sentence with the next, always look for a smooth transition.” Now he tried to take some encouragement from the novelist Georges Perec’s formal experiments with narrative gaps and omissions. “I never experienced such an uncomfortable situation,” Carrère told me. “Honestly, it’s a flaw of the book. Well—this flaw, it’s part of its identity.” He mimed a limp.

hij verzweeg de treurnis niet, maar keek er op een lichte manier naar

after two or three psilocybin sessions, a majority of participants had significant and positive changes in their mood, while 33 percent rated the experience as the most spiritually significant experience of their life, comparable to the birth of a first child or the death of a parent.