A new lease on life
Michael uses a number of similes to describe how it feels to find a new lease of life: “All of this while I left lifted by a strange new medium, a strange element--I now tell you that I was newly buoyant in a brighter life. In the midst of a hymn, God had disappeared. It was like waking from a nightmare in which I'd been paralyzed. Like discovering that gravity itself had been only a bad dream.”
Child metaphor
Again describing his new sense of hope and joy, Michael describes how he "felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities. ”
