What Did Robert Greene Notice the Day After His Stroke?

Robert Greene says that the day after his stroke, a hospital window looked as if he had just been born. The sky was blue, clouds passed, birds showed in it, and trees swayed. The world looked strange, beautiful, and incandescent, and he had never noticed it. The feeling faded. He calls it the shadow of death.

He had used a lot of drugs in his late teens and early 20s, and one peyote trip in Mendocino changed how he looks at simple things. Twenty years ago the book plan was more drugs, ayahuasca, the Amazon, dolphins, and chimpanzees. After the stroke he could not travel, and he says drugs would have been a little dangerous because his walking and balance are poor. Home again, the feeling was missing until he looked out the window and then sat in a small backyard of insects, flowers, and trees. A cup in front of him stopped being only a cup. It had a weird shape, a funny color, and a handle, closer to childhood sight than to use.

He says the body itself is part of that strangeness, the product of 800 million years of evolution, and he compares the nervous system to the first eyes in the Cambrian explosion. Ten days after surgery for a cancerous melanoma on his eye, skin taken from his ear was growing back. He calls ordinary life full of quasi-miracles, not a privilege reserved for an extraordinary trip. He is recounting his own recovery and his own past drug use.