I was in the emergency room of one of my local hospitals for about 15 hours yesterday. I was the one that was sick and for a while the pain kept everything at bay. Intense pain does that to me. I concentrate so hard on surviving its force that everything else fades. About 10 minutes after the nurse injected me with morphine and an antinauseant, I started being able to think about things. Fuzzily, but still there. The thing that came to mind first (I remember telling my daughter all about it) was Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici. I remember talking about the asterisk connection between Browne and Dickinson; the notion of the vessel in alchemy and my sense that Dickinson saw herself as one – one white vessel in which the power of words transmuted the essence of her world and those of her readers (largely her family and friends). I also remember talking about how this kind of thing shows up in American religious thought through people like Hitchcock and Emerson.  Opium. Browne is said to have been an aficionado because of how it freed up the mind to wander along unaccustomed symbolic ways. As a person who has never been a drug user of any description, I can see his point, though it seemed to have freed mine to return its wanted haunts. Still the headache kicker that follows seems to me to take away from the pleasure of the swim.