Quis leget haec?

"That big glorious mountain. For one transitory moment, I think I may have actually seen it."
...
For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations. She'd seen the mountain without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She'd seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains.
What she'd seen in that flash wasn't even a 'mountain.' It wasn't a natural resource. It had no name.
"That's the big goal," she said. "To find a cure for knowledge."

Ignorance truly is bliss, when you overthink every moment, when you can no longer see the beauty of anything, when you are just looking at the information behind it, the knowledge.

When I look out at the waters and all I see are nodes and antinodes.

When I watch the rainbows glow, and nearly sparkle and all I think of are reflecting and refracting prisms of light.

When I listen to the music and hear the tones changing an octave, and think it should have been one lower, not higher...

Watching the logs burn and pop and instead of imagining magic, knowing some form of copper chloride or boric acid is making them those beautiful colours of fiery blue and green.

Ever since the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible. humanity had been a little too smart for its own good, the Mommy said. Ever since eating that apple. Her goal was to find, if not a cure, then at least a treatment that would give people back their innocence.
Formadehyde didn't work. Digitalis didn't work.
None of the natch highs seemed to do the job, not smoking mace, or nutmeg, or peanut skins. Not dill or hydrangea leaves or lettuce juice.
"I figure if Eve could get us into this mess, then I can get us out," the Mommy said. "God really likes to see a go-getter."
...
"The cerebral cortex, the cerebellum," she said, "that's where your problem is."
If she could just get down to using only her brain stem, she'd be cured.
This would be somewhere beyond happiness and sadness.
You don't see fish agonized by wild mood swings.
Sponges never have a bad day.
....
"My goal, the Mommy said, "is not to uncomplicate my life."
She said, "My goal is to uncomplicate myself."
...
Every addiction, she said, was just a way to treat this same problem. Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple. Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.
...
"We don't live in the real world anymore," she said. "We live in a world of symbols."
The Mommy stopped and put her hand in her purse. She held the boy's shoulder and stood looking up at the mountain.
"Just one last little peek at reality," she said. "Then we'll have lunch."
Then she put the white tube in her nose and breathed in.

 Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk

Go on. Go get a dose of reality.