Excerpts from 'The Eden Express', copyright 1975 Mark Vonnegut, Praeger Publishers, New York

"We went to the Works to get a little something to eat. Sitting there sipping coffee, feeling warmer and safer than I had in quite a while, still a little shaking but pretty sure everything was going to be all right, and then something new.

I started falling very deeply in love with the waitress and everyone else in the place. It seemed that they were just as deeply in love with me. It was like something I couldn't get out of my eye.

I didn't understand it, but I recognized it. There were all those little things that had happened occasionally between me and lovers before, but never this strong, never so lastingly, never with so many. I was completely in love, willing to die for or suffer incredibly for whatever they might want. A rush of warmth and emotion, spiritual and physical attraction, a wanting of oneness, a feeling of already oneness.

When I looked at someone, they were everything. They were beautiful, breathtakingly so. They were all things to me. The waitress was Eve, Helen of Troy, all women of all times, the eternal female principle, heroic, beautiful, my mother, my sisters, every woman I had ever loved. Everything good I have ever loved. Simon was Adam, Jesus, Bob Dylan, my father, every man I had ever loved. Their faces glowed with incredible light. It was impossible to focus, to hate, to fix. They were so mobile, all moving, all changing. They were whatever I needed and more. I loved them utterly.

I worried about how complicated this could make my life. Maybe it was enlightenment but it brought up not inconsequential problems of engineering. Who sleeps with whom was one, but there are lots of others. Like what if two people I loved wanted me to do different things? Who would I spend my time with, who would I talk with, who would I dedicate my life to? If I loved everyone there was no way to focus any more, no reason to spend time with anyone in particular.