Lately I wake in the night, and a few panicked seconds pass in which I can’t locate myself. I could tell you my name, certainly, but not which version of me I’m dealing with.

Once, I was sure I was back in my teenage bed. I could almost hear the creak of its metal frame as I ticked over my timetable in my head: science, history, art. Unstable reality that it was, the illusion dissipated, and for a few floundering moments I was no one at all, just someone who remembered being that girl. Then I was me again, the me that exists now, in our blue upholstered bed with sea air surging through the window.

That was unusual. Mostly I am nobody when I wake up, just a consciousness in the darkness trying to piece it all together. It is a strange, free-floating moment, an unanchoring of the self. It is an interlude, like held breath. Eventually it releases, the lungs fill, the world floods in. A reassuring upload of facts. A reboot. I am back.

Lately I can’t read a whole page of a book. It is frictionless, this sliding of attention. I thought it would resolve once the lockdowns ended, but it did not. It’s as if some kind of lubrication has been applied to my choices. I intend to do one thing, but my unconscious shunts me discreetly away. It has other plans for me. I am supposed to be watching. I am supposed to be looking over my shoulder, alert to the next threat.

I do not stop buying books. People do not stop sending them to me. The books become menacing, teetering on every table in the house, massing like the disenfranchised before a riot. Stacked by my desk, they gather alarming cauls of dust.

I resolve to build more bookshelves, but that project, too, eludes me. I am too busy watching, after all. I cannot spare the attention that would absorb.

Lately my hands itch to be occupied. Now that school is back, I take down the hems of Bert’s grey trousers and pin them back in place. There is no sense in buying a new pair. They will barely last the month. He is growing so fast. I can no longer haul him onto my lap and enfold him in my arms. We make, between us, a rough approximation of it, but there are always limbs astray, and one of us ends up writhing in discomfort. We both crave it, the heft of his body against mine, but we are overbalanced now. We sit side by side instead, trying to relive the memory of contact.

So I busy myself with hems, remembering how I first learned this, sewing washbags on bored summer holiday afternoons. My grandmother would watch my overeager little hands and tell me that stitches are placed and not pulled. I must not pull too hard, but neither must I let the thread fall slack. I wonder if pins might be the answer to all my straying. Perhaps I can place careful stitches to hold me in place.

The last decade has filled so many of us with a growing sense of unreality. Even before a global pandemic arrived, we were trapped in a grind of constant change without ever getting the chance to integrate it. Those rolling news cycles, the chatter on social media, the way that our families split along partisan lines: it feels as though we’ve undergone a halving, then a quartering, and now we are some kind of social rubble.

If there were a spirit of this age, it would look a lot like fear. For years now we’ve been running like rabbits. We glimpse a flash of white tail, read the danger signal, and run, flashing our own white tail behind us. It’s a chain reaction, a river of terror surging incoherently onwards, gathering up other wild, alert bodies who in turn signal their own danger. There is no one predator from which to escape; there are many. We are in the business of running now. It is all so urgent. Every year, it seems we must run harder. There is no other solution. We can only run, and panic, and chatter out our fears to others, who will mirror them back to us.

Everything about this time conspires to make us feel so very small. It’s as though the scale of things has overtaken us. The teetering numeric weight of the world has been revealed, and it’s like looking into the face of God: we are blasted by its terrible complexity, its stark enormity. Nothing could have prepared us for this. We are working now to maintain the basics of survival. It is an endless, thankless labour. It sometimes feels as though we are stoking a giant machine that will eventually consume us anyway. We are tired. We are the deep bone-tired of people who no longer feel at home. We can see no way out of it.

Meanwhile, at the edge of consciousness, we sense a kind of absence. It is not so easy to articulate, but it carries its own dark middle-of-the-night fear, its own harrowing. It’s the sense that we have become disconnected from meaning in a way that we don’t even know how to perceive. We sense it when we worry that we cannot stem the flow of our materialism. We sense it when the pull of our smartphones feels a lot like an addiction. We sense it when we realise that our lives are lived in the controlled climate of air conditioning, but we still don’t want to feel the weather outside.

Those are just its everyday manifestations. We feel it most keenly when we reach for the language of grief but find only platitudes, when we hurl the darkest wastes of our experience out into the aether and find no one willing to catch them. Something has been lost here, vanished beyond living memory: a fluency in the experiences that have patterned humanity since we began. We have surrendered the rites of passage that used to take us from birth to death, and in doing so, have rendered many parts of our experience unspeakable. We witness them anyway, separately, mutely, in studied isolation from our friends and neighbours who are doing the same. Centuries of knowledge are lost in this silence, generations of fellowship. Constantly surrounded by conversation, we are nevertheless chronically lonely.

I increasingly feel that a part of me is missing, the part that is able to sit with the seismic changes that come, to sense them and experience them and integrate them, rather than to merely administrate them. As I grow older, this begins to feel like a desperate lack. There has been a yearning in me that I’m only just beginning to understand, a craving for transcendent experience, for depth, for meaning-making. It’s not just that the world needs to change – I need to change, too. I need to soften, to let go of my tight empirical boundaries, to find a greater fluidity in my being. I’m seeking what the poet John Keats called negative capability, that intuitive mode of thought that allows us to reside in ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. The subtle magic of the world offers comfort, but I don’t know how to receive it.

I have lost some fundamental part of my knowing, some elemental human feeling. Without it, the world feels like tap water left overnight, flat and chemical, devoid of life. I am like lightning seeking earth. Uneasy, I carry the prickle of potential energy in my limbs, ever deferred from the point of contact, the moment of release. Instead, it gathers in me, massing like a storm that never comes. I lack the language to even describe it, this vast unsettled sense that I am slipping over the glassy surface of things, afraid of what lurks beneath. I need a better way to walk through this life. I want to be enchanted again.

Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. It relies on small doses of awe, almost homeopathic: those quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them. It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth, and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection, a tingle on the border of our perception. It is the forgotten seam in our geology, the elusive particle that binds our unstable matter: the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it.

Without it, I feel I am lacking some essential nutrient, some vitamin found only when you go digging in your own soil.

I am nine years old, maybe ten, and I’m sitting in the back of my mother’s car. We’re driving through the farmland that begins where our village stops, and I’m thinking, Is this beautiful?

It certainly seemed so to me. Once you left the ranks of identical houses, built of prefabricated slabs of concrete after the war, the land opened up and everything became green. Granted, the fields were low and often flooded, scattered with cabbages and strutted by crows; granted, there were no real vistas, except across the Thames to the power station in Tilbury: but this was all I had, my very own open skies.

Sometimes I walked down there with the girls my mother took in after school. If you carried on past the library and the parade of shops, you eventually reached a mud track with deep grooves from tractor tyres. I once thought I spotted a badger there, but it turned out, on closer inspection and after a fair amount of excited stalking, to be a black bin bag inflated by the wind. There were footprints, though, which might have been a...