Das Gemüt, die Seele, das Innere, die Tiefen: these and other words connoting heart, soul, and the inner depths of the self are the lexical landmarks of German Romantic thinking about interiority. In writings on music, such words map the shadowy inner arena of music’s impact on attentive listeners. The listening posture that accompanied the rise of Romantic musical aesthetics in the late 1790s valorised interior response over external circumstance, the inner sensation of transport over the discharging of functional purposes. In states of rapt attention, perhaps with eyes closed, Romantic listeners desired to be carried away by tones, to be swept up into a world that, as E. T. A. Hoffmann insisted, had nothing to do with everyday concerns or conventional sociality.¹ Contemporary accounts suggest that such experiences could be had in the home, at a concert, or in church. No matter where listeners were located, though, the world into which music transported them was one of both feeling and imagination, a world that stretched inward through the ear to the affective wellsprings of human existence and outward to the realm of nature, whose dynamism served as a frequent point of comparison for musical processes. Listening to a symphony, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder surmised, entailed confronting ‘an entire world’ as well as an ‘entire drama of human emotions’.² Wackenroder’s breathless commentary on the genre of greatest interest to Romantics indicates that the defining quality of instrumental music was its fertile production of metaphor. Music, in short, carried Romantic listeners across some indefinable inner boundary into novel regions of emotion and fantasy. Music’s pertinence for Romantic notions of interiority arises largely from its capacity to induce such transport, a capacity that many witnesses considered unparalleled amongst the arts.

The most voluble contributors to the transformation of musical values between about 1800 and 1830 tended to be German speakers.³ The historical and cultural reasons for this were many, and they include the growing fascination with symbols of darkness and obscurity (such as dense forests, deep waters, and ruined castles); an Enlightenment-rejecting hostility to the perceived superficiality of France, that politically and culturally powerful nation to the west of the fragmented Germanic lands; an unusually high dissemination of mining lore into the popular imagination, abetted by the underground exploits of authors such as Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; and the inward-facing tradition of religious devotion that sprang from seventeenth-century Pietism, itself a disillusioned variation of Lutheranism.⁴ Following the debilitating losses of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), which disproportionally affected Germans, God seemed to have abandoned humans to a world replete with violence and suffering. All the better to seek divinity within through prayer or the cultivation of mystical feelings. Indeed, turning away from the world to pursue private contemplation or reflection presupposes that active immersion in everyday social, political, or mercantile life was antithetical to certain human pursuits. Even the pivotal Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant took his own inward path in the three Critiques – namely, an epistemological turn that redirected thought to the very process of knowing itself, to the hidden constraints that organised human cognition from within. For aesthetes and thinkers frustrated by a lack of sympathy for their enthusiasms, solitary study, creative activity, or even private musical performance offered an escape from mundane reality.

Hoffmann’s fictional musician Johannes Kreisler was one such aesthete, and he will serve as the tour guide for our excursion into the terrain of German Romantic interiority. Composer, keyboardist, music teacher, and all-round eccentric, Kreisler is the central figure of Hoffmann’s music-themed essays Kreisleriana (1814) and a key protagonist in his novel Kater Murr (Tomcat Murr, 1820–1). It might be objected that a fictional character should not be considered a trustworthy guide to Romantic principles. However, not only is Hoffmann’s Kreisler semi-autobiographical, but it would also be quite artificial to insist on a strict separation of truth from fiction in Romantic writings. The very word romantic originally meant novelistic, and Romanticism generally sought to make life artistic and art lifelike; witness, for example, Bettina von Arnim’s semi-fictionalised versions of her correspondence with Goethe and her close friend Günderode. Wackenroder’s best-known essays on music, furthermore, were written as if from the pen of the fictional composer Joseph Berglinger. Without further ado, then, let us turn to the second essay of Kreisleriana (‘Ombra adorata’), which recounts Kreisler’s experiences at a concert of instrumental and vocal music. Its very first lines comprise a suitable point of departure for a study of Romantic aesthetics:

Three guiding principles can be extracted from Hoffmann’s words: that music is inscrutably deep or profound, that musical sounds penetrate into and change the listener’s inner world, and that music is capable of transporting listeners to some more ideal, and markedly spiritual, state of being. This essay will show how each of these principles undergirds broader Romantic convictions about the relationship between music and interiority. I draw for support on the writings of Hoffmann, Wackenroder, and Bettina von Arnim; the philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer; and the author and champion of women’s rights Malwida von Meysenbug. Finally, the essay will close with some reflections on how the Romantics’ much-vaunted inwardness, for all its apparent self-absorption, engages in a dialogue with the natural world through the boundary-defying powers of metaphor and analogy.

Hidden Depths

At issue for Romantic thinkers was not simply the influence music exerted over the inner life, but the way that music seemed to harbour its own inner depths by virtue of its occult efficacy, mathematical foundations, and physical origin in vibration. In particular, commentators on music wondered how (or even if) the sensuous rapture and spiritual transport occasioned by music were related to the art’s numerical and proportional bases, whose rational character seemed so out of step with its affective sway. Hoffmann’s suspicion that music’s ‘deeper mysteries’ could not really be elucidated was shared by Wackenroder, who encapsulated the enigma as follows: ‘Between the individual, mathematical, tonal relationships and the individual fibres of the human heart an inexplicable sympathy has revealed itself, through which the musical art has become a comprehensive and flexible mechanism for the portrayal of human emotions.’⁶ With these words, Wackenroder effectively placed something essential about music, something he called its ‘dark and indescribable element’, in a permanent state of obscurity.⁷

Where explanation is lacking, myth steps in. Wackenroder speculated that before music could advance beyond the ‘screaming and the beating of drums’ of ancient peoples (modelled, one assumes, on Eurocentric notions of allegedly uncivilised contemporaries), ‘wise men first descended into the oracle caves of the most occult sciences, where Nature, begetter of all things, herself unveiled for them the fundamental laws of sound. Out of these secret vaults they brought to the light of day the new theory, written in profound numbers.’⁸ Several senses of mystery and depth converge in these remarks. First, knowledge must be obtained by way of a penetration into the nature of things analogous to the descent into a cave (here, the image is less geological or mineralogical than evocative of the underground oracle at Delphi). Knowledge is then gained only when nature ‘unveils’ herself to inquiring human minds. Finally, the fruits of knowledge – the ‘profound numbers’ of modern music theory – retain an aura of depth indebted to their recondite origins. While the rational underpinnings of music theory may seem to supply the ‘objective’ counterpart to music’s ‘subjective’ impact, both were connected to domains (natural law, interior feeling) marked as inward or deep.

That sound was not a visible property of objects but was caused by physical vibration only added to music’s mystique. Voices emerged from the depths of the vocal cavity, instrumental sounds (in many cases) from a resonance-producing chamber. Just as musical sounds emerged from such inner spaces, so too did they enter the hidden passages of the ear and, by some obscure pathway, find their way to the seat of feeling and emotion. In his writings on aesthetics, Hegel posited that the ‘world of sounds, quickly rustling away, is directly drawn by the ear into the inner life of the heart and harmonizes the soul with emotions in sympathy with it’.⁹ Hegel sought to explain the peculiar effect that music exercises on inner feeling by recourse to two factors: the inward nature of tones (what the Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics calls the ‘earliest inwardness of matter’) and the fleeting character of music, which, by neither occupying nor persisting in space, mirrors the fluidity and non-specific location of ‘inwardness as such’.¹⁰

While it is easy to understand how the sound of the voice (either as uttered or merely imagined) could be considered a medium for mental inwardness, it is nothing short of remarkable that the sounds of inanimate objects fulfil the same purpose in Hegel’s account. This supposition hints at a human readiness to hear sound, whether or not it is produced by living things, as evidence of animation. Confronted with the fragile tones emanating from vibrating bodies, Romantic listeners felt as though they were hearing secret messages transmitted from one soul to another. Hegel’s one-time friend and colleague Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling contended that tone is ‘nothing other than the intuition of the soul of the material body itself’, a phrase that speaks to the borderline animism of Romantic Naturphilosophie.¹¹ Indeed, the liveliness of sound helps to account for much of the intimacy Romantic thinkers intuited between music and the natural world. The narrator of Kreisleriana’s final instalment praises music as a ‘universal language of nature’ that ‘speaks to us in magical and mysterious resonances’, while Kater Murr features a scene in which Kreisler reports that, during an excursion into the countryside, he ‘listened to the voices of the forest and of the brook that spoke to me in comforting melodies’.¹² As only one member of a wider community of jostling, vibrating entities, music exhibits affinities with both living and non-living modes of expression, at least for those skilled in the category-defying, soul-extending perception demanded by Romanticism.¹³

Music Is Inwardness Is Music

Music, Kreisler says, harbours inscrutable mysteries, yet it also resides ‘in the breast of man himself’ and ‘fill[s] his heart with its enchanting images’. Kreisler’s references to the breast and heart might lead one to expect a paean to the feelings music either expresses or awakens. Yet Hoffmann’s take on the expressivist tenets of conventional music aesthetics was rather unusual, as his famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and its reworking in Kreisleriana, demonstrates. In contrast to earlier theories that focused on the isolated, nameable emotions (such as joy or sorrow) purportedly conveyed by music, Hoffmann argues that, when listening to contemporary symphonic works, one ‘leaves behind all precise feelings’ and experiences only ‘an inexpressible longing’.¹⁴ Hoffmann’s commentary traces a progression in which instrumental music gradually penetrates inward, moving from the ‘humanity in human life’ (Haydn) to the ‘superhuman, magical quality residing in the inner self’ (Mozart) to the ‘infinite yearning which is the essence of romanticism’ (Beethoven).¹⁵ Curiously, the further inward one goes, the less personal one gets, with interior exploration ultimately opening out onto the infinite reaches of the sublime.

Beethoven, who in Hoffmann’s view penetrated to the ‘innermost nature’ of instrumental music, revealed that music was essentially both vague and deeply affecting, a peculiar confluence of qualities that distinguished it from representational arts such as poetry and sculpture.¹⁶ Thanks to its non-specific semiotic character, instrumental music was the only ‘genuinely romantic’ art for Hoffmann, ‘since its only subject-matter is infinity’.¹⁷ Even as he rejected the idea that music expresses particular feelings, though, Hoffmann attached specific images to Beethoven’s music as well as to that of his predecessors. Haydn’s symphonies ‘lead us through endless, green forest glades, through a motley throng of happy people’, while Mozart ‘leads us deep into the realm of spirits’, where we ‘hear the gentle spirit-voices of love and melancholy’. Beethoven’s music, finally, ‘unveils before us the realm of the mighty and immeasurable’, where ‘shining rays of light shoot through the darkness of night and we become aware of giant shadows swaying back and forth’.¹⁸ The point of listening, it seems, is not simply to swoon in hazy yearning but to revel in the imagery music spontaneously engenders. In the phase of Romanticism that followed the waning of Enlightenment aesthetics but preceded the rise of programme music later in the nineteenth century, music was considered more an occasion for intensely ‘subjective’ experiences of feeling and the generation of mental images than a vehicle for the ‘objective’ expression of emotion or the representation of events such as sunrises, storms, or battles (all of which Hoffmann rejected as topics of musical discourse).

Wackenroder fell somewhere in the middle of Enlightenment and Romantic aesthetic positions. On the one hand, he hewed to a fairly traditional mimetic theory of music when he stated that ‘no art portrays the emotions in such an artistic, bold, such a poetic … manner’, and he listed a whole gamut of emotions that music might represent, from ‘masculine, exulting joy’ to the ‘sweet, ardent yearning of love’ to ‘deep pain’.¹⁹ On the other hand, Wackenroder discounted the power of language truly to capture such feelings, whereas music, so much more akin to the ‘secret river in the depths of the human soul’, streams feelings out before our very ears.²⁰ And not just any feelings, but explicitly musical feelings. Musical sounds, he wrote, teach us to feel emotion and ‘enrich our souls with entirely new, bewitching essences of feeling’.²¹ These remarks suggest that music does not merely reflect emotions that would exist without it, but inducts listeners into an alternative zone of affect, one whose contents ultimately resist linguistic translation. ‘Why do I strive to melt words into tones?’ Wackenroder asks at the end of his essay, ‘It is never as I feel it.’²² Music represents what is unrepresentable by other means – and thus coaxes feelings from us that could not exist by other means.

Experiences in which one listens to a symphony and undergoes all the feelings of its protagonist-like ‘resounding soul’ (as Wackenroder called it) inspired Hegel to ask how music could so closely resemble or even replace the listener’s own sense of interiority. In addition to the ‘inward’ quality of tone discussed above, Hegel located the key to music’s power in the temporal and insubstantial character music shared with the feelings he understood to be its content. What music ‘claims as its own’, Hegel wrote, ‘is the depth of a person’s inner life as such’.²³ In taking inwardness as its point of departure, music adopts a subject matter that is not cleanly distinguishable from the observer, as, say, a painting of a tree can be said to hang on that wall over there. When we experience emotions, Hegel claims, the distinction between the ‘I’ who experiences and the feelings experienced is ‘not yet explicit’. Instead, emotions are ‘interwoven with the inner feeling as such, without any separation between them’.²⁴ Because of this, music, which constitutes (he says) feelings in the form of tones, wields a power over the heart that does not so much come to consciousness as reside in the ‘undisclosed depth’ of feeling.²⁵ Even though music can be considered a form of sensuous existence independent of the listener, the inherently expressive nature of musical tones and music’s failure to establish a stable existence in either space or time mean that this inescapably mobile art ‘penetrates the arcanum of all the movements of the soul’. ‘Therefore’, Hegel continues, music ‘captivates the consciousness which is no longer confronted by an object and which in the loss of this freedom is carried away itself by the ever-flowing stream of sounds.’²⁶

Though Hegel’s ascription of music’s content to determinate feelings was perhaps not as sophisticated as Hoffmann’s hypothesis of music’s fundamental indeterminacy, Hoffmann would surely have agreed with the philosopher’s account of music’s uncanny ability to take possession of its listeners.²⁷ Indeed, Hoffmann’s alter ego Kreisler epitomises the figure of the listener (and, in his case, performer) routinely possessed by music. For Kreisler, music went so far beyond Kant’s notion of a meaningless ‘play with sensations’ as to threaten the very integrity of his personality.²⁸ The preface to Kreisleriana notes that singing had an ‘almost fatal effect’ on its main character, because ‘his imagination became overstimulated and his mind withdrew into a realm where nobody could follow him without danger’.²⁹ Whether co-opting the listener’s feelings or calling forth a tumult of mental imagery, music issued directives to the self so irresistible as to become a surrogate inwardness. Where the self ‘goes’ in such moments is a question for the next section.

Transported, Within and Beyond

Had Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony not been omitted from the concert that included ‘Ombra adorata’, Kreisler imagines that he would have been transported to a sublime realm that seems thoroughly overpowering, if not outright unfriendly. Much of Kreisler’s language derives from Hoffmann’s earlier review of the Fifth. While the experience Kreisler envisions is unusually violent – he is, after all, immoderately susceptible to music – the sense of being catapulted to the beyond that the passage describes falls squarely within what music’s devotees expected of their favourite art. Even Hegel’s casual reference to being ‘possessed’ by music confirms that, by the 1820s, transport was considered an indispensable feature of Romantic musical experience.

Describing the rich musical life of her childhood in the 1820s and ’30s, Malwida von Meysenbug recalled that she preferred listening over playing because she could give herself up wholly to the music. Otherwise, she had to spend too many dull hours practising the piano in order to achieve the results she had in mind. As an able singer, however, she could play a more active role in bringing about the distinctly musical mood of being ‘transported from the world’ (weltentrückter).³¹ Meysenbug considered music a requirement of the soul, and her memoirs describe a powerful instance of transport she experienced at the funeral of a close friend’s mother. In the midst of the ceremony, she recounts, ‘a power suddenly arose from the beautiful, earnest singing that elevated me above myself. I broke the fetters of grief, full of pride and energy; I raised up my head and eyes, for wings carried me far above fate and death, into the ranks of free spirits.’³² Meysenbug’s account suggests that music affords an inward sensation of soaring spirits, of a virtual inner movement that transports the self beyond its apparent limits. Her impressions had plenty of antecedents: the rapt Berglinger, for example, feels his soul ‘soaring up to the radiant Heavens’ when he listens to music in church, while Kreisler’s ‘soul flies with rapid wing-beats through shining clouds’ as he drinks in the melismas of ‘Ombra adorata’.³³

These and other evocations of flight, along with the vocabulary of soul, spirit, and heavenly motion that frequently accompanies them, indicate that for Romantic listeners, music was a fundamentally spiritual affair. Yet the nature of the spirit involved varied considerably amongst commentators, a situation further complicated by the multivalence of the German word Geist, with its range of sacred and secular meanings. For some listeners, the spiritual import of music was explicitly religious. Wackenroder wrote that music’s raw material (tone) is ‘already impregnated with divine spirit’, while Kreisler maintained that through music, humans are ‘suffused by a divine power’.³⁴ As a self-described idealist, Meysenbug nonetheless refused to relegate spirit to an entirely otherworldly realm. Objecting to the tenets of Christian asceticism, she held that ‘the senses are not the enemies of the spirit, but rather its instruments’.³⁵ In portraying spirit as a partner to sensation rather than its negation, Meysenbug concurred with one of her heroines, Bettina von Arnim, who wrote that music was a ‘medium of the spirit, whereby the sensuous becomes spiritual’.³⁶ For these listeners, the sense of transport was induced by the transmutation of sensuous input into spiritual intimations, a process whose obscurity only further burnished music’s reputation for mystery.

While Romanticism’s spiritual aspirations were undeniably lofty, sometimes transport was just as much about what one was fleeing as where one was going. Kreisler, for example, finds that music opens up a ‘radiant new life’ and offers consolation for the ‘torment’ of everyday reality. Kreisler’s desire for transcendence by way of music arises in large part from the philistinism of the respectable but unimaginative society folk who employ him, while Berglinger complains of the indifferent audiences to whom he pours out his soul in sound. Even as a youth, Berglinger suffered from the ‘bitter conflict between his inborn ethereal striving and the claims of everyday life’, and he would become depressed upon returning from his musical feasts in church to the world of ‘normal, happy, jovial people’.³⁷ Literary portrayals of music as both cause of and panacea for disappointment, as the temporary vehicle of an existence more exalted than that of everyday life, suggest that Romantic ideals thrived best in middle-class settings. Why, indeed, would the well-to-do patrons who employed musicians such as Kreisler (not to mention countless real-life figures) need to be transported to a world beyond the everyday? Servants, farm workers, and other manual labourers, on the other hand, had little leisure time in which to indulge in musical or other artistic pursuits, let alone to bask in what Hoffmann called the ‘purple shimmer of romanticism’.³⁸

A final scene of transport from Hoffmann’s novel Kater Murr illustrates the class-related tensions attendant upon the practising musician’s career. In his capacity as the local Kapellmeister, Kreisler has become entangled with two young friends, Julia and the Princess Hedwiga, daughter of Fürst Irenaus. The Princess has taken offence at Kreisler’s unpredictable behaviour but is also jealous of his musical instruction of Julia (and its successful results). Julia’s mother, the Rätin Benzon, has persuaded the Princess to attend a party where Kreisler will be present, and she urges her not to avoid him just because he ‘behaved now and then in a bizarre way’.³⁹ Just as the Princess makes a halting overture to the Kapellmeister, the partygoers demand music from him and Julia. The two sing an impassioned duet of his own composing that concludes with a graphic climax, one in which both voices ‘founder[ed] in the roaring stream of chords until ardent sighs announced imminent death and the last addio burst forth in a wild cry of pain from the lacerated heart like a fountain of blood’.⁴⁰ Many of the listeners are moved to tears.

The Princess, by contrast, is not amused, and she upbraids Kreisler, saying, ‘Is it right, is it proper that in a pleasant gathering where friendly conversation should prevail … that such extravagant things are served up which lacerate the soul and whose powerful, destructive effect cannot be mastered?’ She continues, ‘Is there then no Cimarosa, no Paisiello whose compositions are written for social gatherings?’ Falsely apologetic, Kreisler retorts, ‘Is it not a violation of all manners and neatness in dress to appear in society with the breast with all its sorrow, all its pain, all its rapture, without a heavy wrapping of the muslin of good manners and propriety?’⁴¹ Increasingly frenzied, Kreisler enjoins Julia to sing several pieces of lighter fare (Paisiello amongst them), an imposition that makes her angry in turn. Stating that she cannot understand his wild lurching from one affect to another, Julia cries, ‘I beg you, dear Kreisler, do not again demand that I sing something comic, no matter how charming and pretty, when I am deeply agitated, and when the sounds of deepest sorrow are echoing in my soul.’⁴² Like Rameau’s nephew in Diderot’s story, Kreisler exchanges his interior states for those of music at the drop of a hat – Julia, however, is too earnest for such aesthetic play. Kreisler’s duet has transported her into a state of spiritual unrest, and she cannot simply forfeit that affect in favour of another. While Kreisler’s susceptibility to music seems to go hand in hand with his unstable personality, Julia’s love of the art arises from her capacity for enduring, authentic feelings. If musical transport takes Kreisler to a place where ‘nobody could follow him without danger’, it does so to the detriment of his mental integrity. For Julia, music sends her more deeply within and strengthens her sense of self. Yet for both, the transport occasioned by music erodes tolerance for the demands of polite society. Transport, it seems, is a dish best served in solitude.

Conclusion: What Is Inward?

The three principles of Romantic musical aesthetics I have elucidated in this essay – that music harbours hidden depths, that it is intimately entwined with inwardness, and that it induces a sense of transport – might be better called impressions or intuitions since the boundaries between them are porous. Ponder one long enough, and it is liable to turn into another: the special qualities of tone, for example, are what allow it to become a vehicle for human inwardness; the inner identification with music is what creates the sensation of being transported; and so on. In this regard, the mutability of Romantic thought, once again, finds its most fitting emblem in music.⁴³

I would like to close by considering one further transformation that music encouraged in the minds of Romantic listeners. While music potentially can be heard in relation to many aspects of human and non-human existence, it is surely no coincidence that so much Romantic commentary on the impact of music resorts to nature imagery. Music may have resembled the flux of feeling, but it also resembled torrents of water, massing clouds and storms, even violent upheavals of the earth. Wackenroder’s description of the images that come to him upon listening to a symphony blends emotive, martial, and natural occurrences into a single dramatic unfolding; his account culminates with distorted shapes falling upon one another like ‘a mountain range come alive’.⁴⁴ The wave-upon-wave unfolding of music seems to have called especially for water imagery. Recall Hegel’s depiction of being carried away by a stream of tones, or Wackenroder’s image of music causing the ‘secret river in the depths of the human soul’ to flow past us in audible form. That music conjures up both ‘an entire world’ and an ‘entire drama of human emotions’, as Wackenroder put it, points not just to music’s capacity to create metaphor, but to a more fundamental relatedness between music, the dynamic nature of the self, and the world in which both are embedded.⁴⁵

Shortly before Hegel began offering lectures on aesthetics, Arthur Schopenhauer located the source of that relatedness in what he termed the will, a blind, eternal striving that courses through inanimate matter and living creatures alike. For Schopenhauer, music’s power over the inner life was so great not because it represented the will that presents itself as feelings and desires, but because it was a directly audible manifestation of will, one whose expressive import could be understood just as immediately as feeling itself.⁴⁶ Nor was that import restricted to the human realm: in musical polyphony, Schopenhauer found an analogue to the world’s stratified ‘grades’ of existence, with soprano, alto, tenor, and bass parts corresponding to human, animal, plant, and mineral registers of being. With very few exceptions, Schopenhauer suggested, human interiority shares in the tendencies and strivings found everywhere else in the universe, a thesis for which music, in his view, offered a strange kind of confirmation. Even as it simulates human (read: linguistic) consciousness through the freedom of melodic invention, music also turns the analogy-prone listener’s attention to the supporting layers of animal, vegetal, and mineral existence metaphorised by the multiple voices of musical texture.

However idiosyncratic Schopenhauer’s perspective, and however reluctant we may be today to believe that music of any sort is immediately comprehensible, Schopenhauer’s conviction that we can hear an echo of ontological totality in music remains a source of inspiration, at least for those inclined to dispense with the customary understanding of music as primarily a matter of human emotions. It may be that, as Hoffmann put it in one of Kreisleriana’s falsely satirical moments, only ‘madmen’ think that music allows them to ‘perceive the sublime song of – trees, flowers, animals, stones, water!’⁴⁷ It would nonetheless be fittingly Romantic if the inward journey inspired by music ended up taking us outward once more, transporting us beyond ourselves by effectively turning our minds inside out.