Thought comes and goes by its own lights, by its own desires, which are inscrutable, he says. Thought comes and goes as it pleases. It approaches. It denies itself: who can say why?

There are some who are touched by thought, caressed by it. There are those who thought lifts up, whom thought presses upwards to the heavens. There are those allowed to bloom in thought, who live beyond themselves in thought, who live astral lives, wandering through the heavens. But there are those, too, who have been deprived of thought, cast out from it. By a flick of its wing, thought floats elsewhere; by a sudden gust, thought is blown away from you.

Do you think thought cares about what it gives you? Do you think thought pays any heed to us at all? Thought is a blinded eye, he says. Thought is a gaze that does not see you.

There are some who fear thought, fear thought – the power of thought; who fear what thought does to them, what thought makes them. There are some who don’t even want to think, for whom thought is assault and dispossession. There are some who seek to hide from thought, as Adam hid in the thickets of paradise. There are some who flee thought, like Jonah, who ran to the very ends of the earth. There are some who place guns to their temples and press the trigger. There are some who plead for exorcism, plead for lobotomy ...

But there are those, too, who are reverent about thought, who surround it with ceremonies, kinds of thought-prayers. They regard thought as a gift from God, he says. But thought is also ravishment and wildfire and destruction. You can no more pray to thought than to a volcano on the brink of eruption; thought is as indifferent to the thinker as a tornado is to the town it ravages.

Thought happens – or it does not happen, his brother said. Thought comes – or it does not come. You who were thought’s vessel, may soon become the husk of thought. You, who were once touched by thought, are now its empty shell…