One drowsy morning, with the sky overcast but showing no signs for a shower of drizzle, I got up earlier than usual, for I had an appointment concerning my search for a 'job', namely to be within the tide of the fray, to present myself as 'doing' something or something more than myself, the norm now. But it turned out to be a 'collective' reunion or meeting, with some eight heads like myself and a presenter or an instructor, who was all set for touting to us what she had been instructed, to let us follow the pattern of how we should present ourselves before a recruiter and so on... Within not more than half an hour, except the pre-rites of setting oneself as stilted and knowing among us and the presenter's own fusses before getting into her business, the reunion happened to be animated with some sort of mutually shared catharsis being taken advantage of marked by issuing strange cries and hissing and slackening into oneself. And at such a point, when I was sort of jaded but receptive so far, I had an optical illusion. Through the wide glass of the window just before me, as it was on the third floor, my tired eyes, always eager to identify a plant or a tree, happened to roam beyond the dancing leaves of acacia trees presenting themselves before me. The topography being a vale with a range of low wooded eminences on its either side, the land undulates here and there creating an abrupt bump before one’s eyes. And in a comparatively far distance within my ken, with a row of planted trees alongside a track, I found something gray or whitish with a wide strip of bright green moving one after another, like a snaking trail of something. And, in no time, I somehow took it for a RER train running on its track to Chessy. So I assured myself that it was. But, as my tired eyes happened to roam a bit to one corner of the view framed by the window, to my surprise, I found a rising shaft of a shiny steel chimney, maybe of a factory of the sort, with a grayish trail of smoke issuing from its top. The languidly undulating trail of it like blown by a zephyr of balanced force, its wavy form and motion kept in a steady horizontal position just at the level of trees heads, my tired eyes, the distance, the noises around me, the chimney edged away to one corner of my view, the resemblance of colors, etc. facilitated in my having such a pleasant optical illusion that was itself so soothing even after its having been debunked by myself. So, rather unsuccessfully, I made an attempt or twice to reconstruct the first illusion.
