Solution Quotes - page 15
It came upon me sometime in my fifteenth year that I no longer woke up with sudden excitements-"Today I will get the Clerici solution! Today I will read about Humphry Davy and electric fish! Today I will finally understand diamagnetism, perhaps!” I no longer seemed to get these sudden illuminations, these epiphanies, these excitements which Flaubert (whom I was now reading) called "erections of the mind.” Erections of the body, yes, this was a new, exotic part of life-but those sudden raptures of the mind, those sudden landscapes of glory and illumination, seemed to have deserted or abandoned me. Or had I, in fact, abandoned them?
Oliver Sacks