TR chance/accidents ch 4 re: Otto is a bonehead

[Jed Kelestron]

"There was a moment of transition that was abrupt: enlightenment was
too smooth a word for the jolt I felt.It was a dream, but only much
later was I to realize that there would be no awakening. With that
long snout the seadragon was touching the other side of the glass to
which my face was pressed. [...] was the seadragon saying to me [...]
I shall be you? And shall I, I wondered, be you?"     --from 'Gould's
Book of Fish' by Richard Flanagan, a novel about a counterfeiter in
which Flanagan plagiarizes many authors by seamlessly  inserting
quotes from their works in the text.

"To realize that was, for the first moment, like the horror of a man
buried alive awaking to his fate. Outside, my face came close to the
glass again, I saw my mouth, the lips compressed with the effort of
understanding the axolotls. I was an axolotl and now I knew instantly
that no understanding was possible. He was outside the aquarium, his
thinking was a thinking outside the tank. Recognizlng him, being him
himself, I was an axolotl and in my world."    --from 'Axolotl' by
Julio Cortazar