When I encountered Giordano’s painting among many in the open circle during the class, I was immediately intrigued by how it destabilized my perceptions. The divinity is no longer the metaphysical being detached from us. The blurry brushes delineating the clouds and God that envelop Solomon, when juxtaposed with the solid statues in Solomon’s bedroom and the ambiguous contours of the temple in the background, immerse me in a world in which I’m half awake and half asleep, no longer a solid “mind” grounded in the present upon which the material surroundings are projected, but rather surrendering my agency, disembodying myself to exist in different times and realms. Through Giordano’s painting, I sense faith as an acknowledgement of our rationality’s limitation in probing the temporal depth of our existence — a determination to perceive, to let our consciousness run free (or under the transcendent being) for answers. The sublime is, like the revelation to Solomon, the ecstatic instant when déjà vu becomes clear again, when we, like a rehearsal of near-death experience, see the fabrics of how a multitude of our lived moments are woven together, empowering us to live despite purposelessness. I immediately come to a moment of realization — that the the beauty of Giordano’s painting lies in how it highlights the universality of such moments of revelation, which are not exclusive to figures like Solomon, but rather a deeply personal experience in hypnagogia that we come into contact with everyday. For me, it’s the seemingly unfounded sensitivity to sound that brings me into similar states of suspension. Just as God descends upon Solomon’s dream in Giordano’s blurry painting, blending the divine with the mundane and reminding me of being both in and outside of time, so too do the moments before the coming of sounds — the creaking floorboards, the whisper of wind in a snowstorm — always draw my thoughts away from the Jocyean beauty whenever I’m in solitude on bed. In a sense, I’m captured by a fleeting uneasiness, quivering at the thought that “the moment” — the eruption of any sound — might be on the verge, yet at the same time, I subconsciously yearn for its arrival to break me free. This tension, evoked in me by Solomon’s uncomfortable, reserved posture upon receiving God’s grace, is constantly overlaid with a certain melancholy, a certain perception of a missing piece in the puzzle of my desire — one whose guide book only surface when I relive the distant “me” caressed by the summer breeze and bamboo mat. Even though the snow still falls, upon the vaporizing street of New York City, upon the colorful umbrellas and apparitions swaying over the grandiose mosaics of the church gate, its gentleness would soon be overshadowed by cacophonies, probably from the lightnings jabbing out of the sky, or the hurricanes battering the earth. I was plunged into the whiteness of the snow, then into a blankness that stretches, expands and absorbs any attempts at diversion, before a “Creeeaaak” sounds; blood surges to my brain; a wave quickly grips me with the sharpness of a fleeting headache, shattering any tranquility of the snowy night. An icy sensation, as if being contagious, from tiptoes soon conquer my torso through the branching veins. The watermelons cut in half, the cartoonish ninjas reminding me of those in early Shogun dramas that I watched when I was still in the cradle, and the bright sparkles when “the me” grazes his fingers over the slippery digital surface — these images, which would have evoked the utmost euphoria in a child, but now only invite confusion, mockery, and indifference, seem to propel “the me”  through multiple arduous journeys down that creaky corridor, risking the harshest scoldings and punishments from my mother, to fetch that object of attraction. The creaking sound intensifies despite the drowning cacophonies as I watch myself nimbly take each step — first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth — before that dooming “whoosh” of my parent’s door reached my ears, an elongated shadow, not unlike the mugginess of that tropical summer, had already crept, enveloped and engulfed me. And it is in that defining moment, with its forgotten fragments — like sensations buried beneath layers of time — that it reveals itself not as mere echo of the past, but as a cipher of my present; a first negotiation between my very act of recalling and the resistance of my consciousness, the first trembling step into the unknown where terror and wonder once coexisted. In Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the simple act of tasting a piece of madeleine evokes so much nostalgia in the protagonist, as he embarks on a never-ending search to piece together fragments of his parts that constitute his present. Similarly, Solomon’s divine encounter in Giordano’s painting, infused with his hope for the prosperity of his people, must have resembled the ecstatic sensations when the cake moistened by a sip of lime tea touches the palette of Proust’s protagonist — much like the swirling snowflakes that, like what James Joyce wrote in the Dead, “fall upon all the live and the dead” (222, Joyce), bearing witness to my faithful search for the covered and indistinguishable in that tropical night.