As we approach sharing let us ask: "What belongs to me?"Balance sheet of a life ratified by death.Whatever exists has no existence unless shared.Possessions under seal are lost possessions.At first sight, giving, offering yourself in order to receive an equivalent gift in return, would seem to be ideal sharing.But can All be divided?Can a feeling, a book, a life be shared entirely?On the other hand, if we cannot share all, what remains and will always remain outside sharing? What has never, at the heart of our possessions, been ours?And what if we can share the vital desire to share, our only means of escape from solitude, from nothingness?

    In a bare dozen pages Daumal struggles to describe and analyze in rational terms sensations and reflections on the brink of unconsciousness and even death. His youthful experiments with tetrachloride, whose results he has corroborated from other sources, furnish his direct evidence. For nearly 20 years this evidence has left him with the absolute certainty (he repeats and underlines the word) of having entered another world. It is not, he insists, the passive, backward-looking world of dreams to which he attained but a realm of superior awareness, which he describes in visual, mathematical, and acoustic detail:It is important to repeat that in that new state of being, I perceived and understood perfectly the ordinary state of being, the latter being contained within the former, as waking consciousness contains our unconscious dreams, and not the reverse. This last irreversible relation proves the superiority (in the scale of reality or consciousness) of the first state over the second.

    Grammatical explanations for the basic structures and footnote translations for unfamiliar vocabulary are provided. Selections by Dumas, Hugo, Bernard, Verne, Mme. de Beaumont, Perrault, and Diop are featured.