A quick connection

I had reached my destination fifteen minutes too early. It was before my first Tuesday class, being Economics 101, that I decided to pop a squat on Leon Johnson's lawn and open Nabokov's Pale Fire which I had started on Sunday. I began Canto III and several pages later came across a passage our class might find applicable and interesting.
So it goes:

"Patly I fell. My heart had stopped to beat,
It seems, and several moments passed before
It heaved and went on trudging to a more
Conclusive destination. Give me now
Your full attention.
                            I can't tell you how
I knew--but I did know that I had crossed
The border. Everything I loved was lost
But no aorta could report regret.
A sun of rubber was convulsed and set;
And blood-back nothingness began to spin
A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

I realized, of course, that it was made
Not of our atoms; that the sense behind
The scene was not our sense. In life, the mind
Of any man is quick to recognize
Natural shams, and then before his eyes
The reed becomes a bird, the knobby twig
An inchworm, and the cobra head, a big
Wickedly folded moth. But in the case
Of my white fountain what it did replace
Perceptually was something that, I felt,
Could be grasped only by whoever dwelt
In the strange world where I was a mere stray.

And presently I saw it melt away:"
                                                    (page 59)

After reading Santayana and remembering that Nabokov had synesthesia the passage was enriched.