State of Mind
»The old man thought solely lonely, admittedly prudent, but rarely happy thoughts; thoughts as sturdy, as serenely savvy, as sorrowfully stable in their shrewd sanity that a tree in winter might have thought them if a tree could think. His thoughts and feelings had converged so that they were almost indistinguishable from one another: in his mind, ideas languished motionlessly, and had done for decades. Emotions no longer set anything into motion. Language, too, once a weapon, a sword, a skill, had become a cloak to wrap oneself in, against the dying of one’s day, against the emptying of one’s mind. Matter mattered less now. Vanity vanished. What had once seemed ungainly and enormous turned into ephemera. The fabric of everything lay bare, open to the seeing eye, its threads terrifyingly thin. Being otherworldly in this world was no feast for the weak.«
Source: Internet Archive of Book Images
