Story, first published: Fantastic Stories of Imagination, March 1963
Physician to the Universe contains one of those moments where (for me) Simak highlights the overlap between the everyday and the mystical so well. ...
There is the moment where the main character is a child watching the leaves falling in autumn in that kind of full awareness that happens sometimes and in this moment something else happens.....which comes to preoccupy him for years and turns out to be the link to "some living, (perhaps even loving) thing that quivered somewhere very close to him and yet very far away".
Perhaps I read too much in here (I enjoy this though), but for me Simak in the way he wrote and constructed this moment was aware, consciously or unconsciously, of those other (well-documented) mystical moments that suddenly open, such as for instance the one that transformed Jakob Bohme's life when he suddenly saw the nature of the universe in a ray of sunlight reflected off a tin lid.
yesitshugh: Message in the Clifford Simak Fan Group