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The world was warm and white when I was born:Beyond the windowpane the world was white,A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light,Although the whiteness was almost and was boneIn midnight's still paralysis, neverthelessThe world was warm and hope was infiniteAll things would come, fulfilled, all things would be knownAll things would be enjoyed, fulfilled, and come to be my own.
The German philosopher Heidegger, thinking of the immense human endeavor in which we construct and maintain a consistent world of existing, revealed things out of the pure potential of Being, once remarked that the act of waking from sleep must surely constitute the single greatest miracle of human life; for within a fraction of a second after our being “dead to the world,” that world reassembles itself before our eyes and senses in its familiar form and retains its customary regularity. Inspired by an understanding of the phenomenological import of awakening similar to Heidegger's, the French critic Georges Poulet (Miller, 1963) has sought to explore the world's literature in search of passages describing moments of awakening, hoping to gain thereby an understanding of the “interior distance” of those writers who created such passages.