an eyeful of fish-scale and star

All right then. Pull yourself together. Is this where I'm spending my life, in the "reptile brain" this lamp at the top of the spine like a lighthouse flipping mad beams indiscriminately into the darkness, into the furred thoraxes of moths, onto the backs of leaping fishes and the wrecks of schooners? Come up a level; surface.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,
by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row, 1974)

Ten Books That Will Ripple Your Thinking ... Number 8