IJ study archive

Troeltsch sick in bed

quote

It’s literally ‘daydreaming,’ sick, the kind of incomplete fugue you awaken from with a sort of psychic clunk, struggling up to sit upright, convinced there’s someone unauthorized in the dorm room with you. Falling back sick on his circle-stained pillow, staring straight up into the prolix folds of the Turkish blanketish thing Pemulis and Schacht had Krazy-Glued to the ceiling’s corners, which billows, hanging, so its folds form a terrain, like with valleys and shadows.

Context

Troeltsch feverish and supine, drifting through half-sleep. Carlisle flags this as the first appearance of billowing motion as a fear-object — the glued-up blanket's hanging folds, seen from flat on the back, the seed image for Day's billowing shape and It's black folds. The dread here is still ambient and feverish, not yet clinical.

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