The Traveler: A Curious Feeling of Transcendence

Every once in a while a curious feeling would come over me, while walking in the woods that bordered the inn, or sitting in my room doing paperwork. People don’t realize how much paperwork is involved in a job like this. They think it’s all shooting people and running through the woods with dogs chasing you, but that’s only a small part of it. We also gather intelligence, naturally, because of the incidents we witness and the conversations we are privy to, so when I would rather be relaxing solving chess problems or reading a novel or (lately, I guess my journal writing has led to this) composing poems—instead of those things, I am often filling out reports. We also are not profligate with our spending. There must be controls on expenditures. So for instance I might be hankering after a new rifle sight, or a listening device said to be superior to anything on the market, but I have to consider the cost, as most such work-related expenses are covered by the company.
Anyway, I’ll be sitting there, or walking, and a feeling will come over me that I am an ancient being, a thousand years old say, and a feeling of weariness with the world, but also a sense of peace, as if this has all happened many times before and will continue to happen many times in the future. In fact, in such a state, and it only lasts for a few seconds, or sometimes up to two minutes, but during that state nothing matters; it is as though I’ve left my body and am viewing everything from a point just to the right of my head. I can see myself, I can hear the birds in the forest, I can hear crowd noises. That’s the other thing, when this happens, I seem to be everywhere in the world simultaneously, not just walking in the forest or sitting in my room but also driving in a jeep across the African desert and wandering in an Istanbul bazaar, sitting in Yankee Stadium watching a game, and paddling a canoe across a lake, all pleasant activities that have nothing to do with where I am, or where I think I am, and what I think is actually happening.
I cherish those moments. There is no way to plan for them or produce them artificially. I’ve tried meditating, prayer, duplicating routes—you know, I followed this route through the forest at this time of day and had that experience, can I duplicate it in that way? Nothing seems to work. It seems rather that I occasionally fall into some other dimension where time is simultaneous. And in that world I am wise! In my day-to-day life that is that last thing people would say of me. They would say I am efficient, kind, dependable, and sometimes brave. But not wise. That doesn’t go with my outfit. But when these otherworldly experiences occur, I feel as if I see the history of the world and understand it both in detail and with a kind of large and generous compassion.
And then it stops and I am back in my room, filling out an expense report, or walking through the woods with my camera.

NOTE: The Traveler, or, Meditations of a Company Man, illuminates the inner life of an assassin trained as a child in the art of murder and employed by a shadowy company whose national allegiances are forever cloaked in mystery. The short pieces that make up The Traveler weave in and out of time in an organic pattern more akin to music than to narrative fiction. Its pleasures lie in the joy of words heard and felt for their own particular, undefinable magic.–CT

I dislike the return. I would like to go permanently to that other world where I do not exist as distinct from others, where the furniture in my room is nothing but waves of energy, where the boundaries between my body and the air are not so distinct, but a feeling of permeability suffuses everything. I would like to be at peace, and in these moments of strange dissolving of what I take to be my being, where I cease to exist as an individual and am more like a disembodied presence, I am at peace.
But the moments never last. I have come to accept that. They last only long enough to remind me that this is not all that there is, that my activities which I vainly consider so important to the balance of world power, that my expertise, it is all like the chirping of a bird on a wire, lost in the wind coming off the ocean, an atmospheric noise, something disregarded by surfers heading to the beach and a family eating a picnic lunch on a blanket spread out among the dunes.