sight and touch

Standing there at the wheel, conscious of the pull Ella was exerting, almost as though she were hanging heavily and warmly from my skin, a heaviness which centred at the base of my spine and at the back of my thighs, and conscious at the same time of the flickering images of the afternoon, it came to me suddenly that touch was more important than sight.

Touch convinced in a way in which sight did not. I was struck by the fact that sight is hypnotised by the surface of things; more than that, it can know only surfaces, flatnesses at a distance, meagre depths at close range. But the wetness of water felt on the hand and on the wrist is more intimate and more convincing than its colour or even than any flat expanse of sea. The eye, I thought, could never get to the centre of things; there was no connection between my eye and a plant on the windowsill or between my eye and the woman to whom I was about to make love.

Alexander Trocchi, Young Adam (1954; London: Calder, 2003), pp. 35-36.