Roget Caillois, "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia"

On the lure of space.

"Matter becomes critical with represented space because the living creature, the organism, is no longer located at the origin of the coordinate system but is simply one point among many. Dispossessed of its privilege, it quite literally no longer knows what to do with itself."

"I know where I am, but I don't feel that I am where I am. For dispossessed minds such as these, space seems to constitute a will to devour. Space chases, entraps, and digests them in a huge process of phagocytosis. Then, it ultimately takes their place. The body and mind thereupon become dissociated; the subject crosses the boundary of his own skin and stands outside of his senses. He tries to see himself, from some point in space. He feels that he is turning into space himself- dark space into which things cannot be put. He is similar; not similar to anything in particular, but simply similar. And he dreams up spaces that "spasmodically possess" him."
[Du and i: I feel vast.]

"Anthony in turn falls prey to the lure of material space: he wants to disperse himself everywhere, to be within everything, "to penetrate each atom, to descend into the heart of matter- to be matter." Although Flaubert emphasizes the pantheistic, even magisterial aspect of this descent into Hell, here it nonetheless appears as a form of that process whereby space is generalized to the detriment of the individual, unless we should evoke, using psychoanalytic language, the return to an original insensate condition and prenatal consciousness- a mere question of terminology."

"Alongside the instinct of self-preservation that somehow attracts beings toward life, there proves to be a very widespread instinct d'abandon attracting them toward a kind of diminished existence; in its most extreme state, this would lack any degree of consciousness or feeling at all. I am referring, so to speak, of the inertia of the élan vital."

"Under its influence [the appeal of space] life seems to lose ground, to blur the line between organism and environment as it withdraws."