I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild.

A flight of perplexed unstable minds into the Confessional, into Spiritualism, into strange Eastern Cults.

Off with their heads!

His brain convulsed,
his mind split open.
Vertigo, hysteria, lurchings
and launchings came over him,
he staggered and flapped desperately,
he was revolted by the thought of known places
and dreamed strange migrations.

The people in flight from the terror behind-strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.

Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently.

My thoughts were full of other things When I wandered off the path.

Some, perhaps, would fall by the way. Some, old or sick, would drop out of the caravan and creep away into a solitary place to die; others would be picked off by gunners, defying the law for the fancied pleasure of stopping in full flight a brave and fiercely burning life; still others, perhaps, would fall in exhaustion into the sea. But no awareness of possible failure or disaster dwelt in the moving host, flying with sweet pipings through the northern sky. In them burned once more the fever of migration, consuming with its fire all other desires and passions.

All of this had seemed so obvious and vital to them once. But then it changed, in the timeless time since putting their vessel together; some might even say, they’d degenerated. They were no longer the beings who’d set themselves an impossible task and built themselves a miraculous vessel to help them accomplish it. In that time they had forgotten all of their arcane and hard-won knowledge and become passengers, instead of engineers. Now the bubble piloted itself, without their input; and the glorious mission that had once been the whole reason for their existence now seemed nothing but an ancient folly, too far gone to change.
They wouldn’t have understood Vietnam, but they would have sympathized.

They cannot finde that path, which first was showne,
But wander too and fro in waies vnknowne . . .

Their feet through faithless leather met the dirt,
And oftener chang'd their principles than shirt.

Some, perhaps, would fall by the way. Some, old or sick, would drop out of the caravan and creep away into a solitary place to die; others would be picked off by gunners, defying the law for the fancied pleasure of stopping in full flight a brave and fiercely burning life; still others, perhaps, would fall in exhaustion into the sea...In them burned one more the fever of migration, consuming with its fires all other desires and passions.

He was carried over the difficult places in spite of himself; and he went plunging away in mad career — a very Mazeppa-ride upon the wild horse Speculation.

Once again, I was confused. It felt like bits of reality and unreality were randomly changing places.