He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.

Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.

The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis.

Odd that the brain could function on its own, without acquainting him with its purposes, its reasons. But the brain was an organ, like the spleen, heart, kidneys. And they went about their private activities. So why not the brain?

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans.

Dilemma of civilized man; body mobilized, but danger obscure.

That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.