Lew found himself surrounded by a luminosity new to him, not even observed in dreams, nor easily attributable to the smoke-inflected sun beginning to light Chicago.
* * * * * * * * * *
Oh man! I forgot this book has something to do with light! Or, at least, this chapter being that it's called "The Light Over the Ranges." And also there's that stuff about photography which we've seen a bit of with Merle but we'll see much more of in a later section. Here's a reminder of how the quality of the light, being the thing which allows vision to happen, changes perception.
Lew is having a mystical experience akin to Reverend Cherrycoke's transformation in Ludgate prison (unless it was the Tower of London, the big liar). But I can't easily attribute Lew's experience to ergot. Although it is the early 1890s so he's probably recently ingested some weird chemical, drug, or toxin that's warped his brain. Maybe just inhaling all the cow meat in the air can cause a guy to get a little wonky in the morning.
But does the cause even matter? Shouldn't a mystical experience be simply taken as a mystical experience even if the cause is something explicable? In a tangible world of science and understanding, does a mystical experience have to be completely unexplained in any way? What does the cause matter to the person having the experience? They're going to be transformed in some way whether or not somebody can say, "Oh, yeah, chemicals flooded your brain in that traumatic moment and lack of oxygen as you were bleeding out. It wasn't actually angels visiting you and declaring you're the most special and unique person ever." The brain breaking out of its furrow is a powerful thing. Seeing the world the same way every single day because everything in the brain is in the same working order and then suddenly the brain decides everything is absolutely different? That's fucking powerful. It's why so many people get religious and weird over hallucinogens.
Something happened to Lew's brain in this moment. Clarity. Revelation. Atonement. Whatever it was, he suddenly saw the world differently, "in a new light," as they say. Everything was about to change for him.
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