A burr under the saddle of the mind

Adam Gopnik explores the geography between the mind and the eye and the bottom end of illusions, guile, and belief in The New Yorker. Maybe, perhaps, maybe the illusion with the most meat on the bone is that we keep believing, that we have redundant epiphanies, or, inversely, deja vu moments in the dark, that we keep looking and looking and looking, sometimes directly into it, sometimes obliquely like we are pretending to ignore it, until it turns away so that we can get a better stare, a finer inspection.

Smoke. A mirror.