I am an old man. I live here in this ancient house, surrounded by huge, unkempt gardens.
The peasantry, who inhabit the wilderness beyond, say that I am mad. That is because I will have nothing to do with them.
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Context: The opening lines of the Recluse's manuscript.
Source: Chapter II: The Plain of Silence
Then, for the last time, I saw the earth — an enduring globule of radiant blue, swimming in an eternity of ether. And there I, a fragile flake of soul dust, flickered silently across the void, from…
Light! One must spend an eternity wrapped in soundless night, to understand the full horror of being without it.
The sun was dying; of that there could be little doubt; and still the earth whirled onward, through space and all the aeons.
'Yesterday — ' I stopped, suddenly. Yesterday! There was no yesterday. The yesterday of which I spoke had been swallowed up in the abyss of years, ages gone.
And so, by millions of years, time winged onward through eternity, to the end — the end, of which, in the old-earth days, I had thought remotely, and in hazily speculative fashion. And now, it was…