The normal answer seems to be the feeling that something you should be familiar with is totally unfamiliar.

Would this be avant verrais, deja vu or something else, I wonder:

I remember meeting an old guy, long and lean and hardy, up north in cottage country who had a "Tea Room" and an obsession with the symbol "0" [zero]. ["0" flew everwhere: on a flag atop his "Tea Room", on his outhouse wall, on the grocery basket strapped to the handlebars of his bicycle.] Esmond believed "0" is the key to the universe, explaining that in bookkeeping, the debits and the credits always cancel one another out to produce "0". [So it is with the universe, he averred.]

Any way, this old guy, who's name was Esmond - [who sold his own truly ungainly oil paintings to Tea Room customers who bought them because Esmond was a true original, not an artist - I used to call Esmond "Esmondo" and actually bought one of his paintings on condition that he sign it "Esmondo", which he did] - returning to my storyline - Esmond told me once, as I drank his tea and listened to his piano playing and ate his butter tarts baked over his wood burning stove, he told me that he had hitchhiked up to this country many years ago, and when he stood on a rock outcropping looking over the land, he realized that this was his home. For him it was meant to be. It was all laid out for him in the cosmic scheme of things.

In short, "Esmond's Tea Room" was avant verrais. Or was it deja vu? Or was it simply Esmondo-as-he-was-meant-to-be [Esmond-before-the-incarnation-of-Esmondo]?

People used to arrive from all over to visit Esmond to soak up his wisdom [his joie de verrais?]. He didn't believe in sickness, it was all psychosomatic, he said. [In the summer, he bathed in the lake, a short distance away. In the winter, he bathed in a snow bank.] When people asked Esmond for his keys to the Cosmos and an eternity of bliss on another plane of existence released from repeated resurrections in an earthly shell, he always told them this:

"When you come here, you can drink from my well. But, when you go away, you must dig your own well."

I still think $35 wasn't too much to pay for my original "Esmondo".