VERTIGO:
In a garden, I’m stretched out on a lawn. There is a certain place in the lawn where the ground rises up in a cone shape. I settle myself so that the nape of my neck is exactly on top of it, so that my head is “thrown back” and I can “see the sky” better.
The first time, I’m with my sister—the one I ask the big questions, the one I trust—I say to her: “…but behind this sky, is there another?”
She laughs and tells me there are many others. I laugh too and say that “of course, since there’s a seventh heaven.” She gets serious and explains to me that we are surrounded by sky, that the earth turns, that the sky has no end.
She leaves.
I stay there a very long time, motionless, dreaming of infinity, trying to imagine infinity physically. A terrible anxiety seizes me, but I do not move and I soon manage to “feel” the earth turning. My head still in this position “was actually and violently turning.”
Each evening, when the noises had died down, I returned there to find this feeling of the earth turning and to feel lost in it, carried away in this vertigo.
—Laure, “The Sacred”
Francisco de Goya, Atropos (c. 1819–1823).
The Wasted World 