The woods had vanished; the earth was a waste of shadow. No sound broke the silence of the wintry landscape. No cᴑck crowed; no smoke rose, no train moved. A man without a self, I said. A heavy body leaning on a gate. A dead man. With dispassionate despair, with entire disillusionment, I surveyed the dust dance; my life, my friends' lives, and those fabulous presences, men with brooms, women writing, the willow-tree by the river--clouds and phantoms made of dust too, of dust that changed, as clouds lose and gain and take gold and red and lose their summits and billow this way and that, mutable, vain. I, carrying a notebook, making phrases, had recorded merely changes; a shadow, I had been sedulous to take note of shadows. How can I proceed now, I said, without a self, weightless and visionless, through a world weightless, without illusion?