He lay down in his blankets. It was growing dark, long late midsummer twilight in the woods. He wanted to go down to the river to bathe but he felt too bad. He turned over and looked at the small plot of ground in the crook of his arm. My life is ghastly, he told the grass. The girl woke him, shaking him by the shoulder. He’d heard his name called and he rose up wondering. The boy was coming up out of the darkness downriver with a load of pale and misshapen driftwood like scoured bones from a saint’s barrow. At the fire the woman bent and stooped and placed the blackened pots about and the old man squatted on his haunches and rolled one of his limp wet cigarettes and lit it deftly with a coal and watched.

They ate almost in silence, a light smacking of chops, eyes furtive in the light of the lantern. The meal consisted of the whitebeans and cornbread and the boiled chicory coffee. There was about them something subdued beyond their normal reticence. As if order had been forced upon them from without. From time to time the woman awarded to the round dark a look of grim apprehension like a fugitive. When Suttree had finished he thanked her and rose from the table and she nodded and he went off toward the river.

He woke once in the night to the sound of voices, a faint lamentation that might have been hounds beyond the wind but which to him as he lay watching the slow procession of lights on a highway far across the river like the candles of acolytes seemed more the thin clamor of some company transgressed from a dream or children who had died going along a road in the dark with lanterns and crying on their way from the world.

"But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."

“It is possible to imagine an art in which the limitations of reality would be minimized, in which the made and the unmade would be indistinct, an art that would be instantaneously real, without ghosts. And perhaps that art exists, under the name of literature.

In this sense all the arts have a literary basis, built into their history and their myths. Architecture is no exception. In advanced, or at least sedentary, civilizations, building requires the collaboration of various kinds of tradesmen: bricklayers, carpenters, painters, then electricians, plumbers, glaziers, and so on. In nomadic cultures, dwellings are made by a single person, almost always a woman. Architecture is still symbolic, of course, but its social significations are manifest in the arrangement of dwellings within the camp.

The same thing happens in literature: in the composition of some works, the author becomes a whole society, by means of a kind of symbolic condensation, writing with the real or virtual collaboration of all the culture’s specialists, while others works are made by an individual, working alone like the nomadic woman, in which case society is signified by the arrangement of the writer’s books in relation to the books of others.”

It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of the season. A great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapours; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvellous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the back-end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare.

"Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.

Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be."

Aziz liked to hear his religion praised. It soothed the surface of his mind, and allowed beautiful images to form beneath. When the engineer’s noisy tirade was finished, he said, “That is exactly my own view.” He held up his hand, palm outward, his eyes began to glow, his heart to fill with tenderness. Issuing still farther from his quilt, he recited a poem by Ghalib. It had no connection with anything that had gone before, but it came from his heart and spoke to theirs. They were overwhelmed by its pathos; pathos, they agreed, is the highest quality in art; a poem should touch the hearer with a sense of his own weakness, and should institute some comparison between mankind and flowers. The squalid bedroom grew quiet; the silly intrigues, the gossip, the shallow discontent were stilled, while words accepted as immortal filled the indifferent air. Not as a call to battle, but as a calm assurance came the feeling that India was one; Moslem; always had been; an assurance that lasted until they looked out of the door. Whatever Ghalib had felt, he had anyhow lived in India, and this consolidated it for them: he had gone with his own tulips and roses, but tulips and roses do not go. And the sister kingdoms of the north—Arabia, Persia, Ferghana, Turkestan—stretched out their hands as he sang, sadly, because all beauty is sad, and greeted ridiculous Chandrapore, where every street and house was divided against itself, and told her that she was a continent and a unity.

Part 1, Chapter IX, Page 96

"It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.

To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration."

"I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched. Here we sat together, Maxim and I, hand-in-hand, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny little fragment of time he would never remember, never think about again…For them it was just after lunch, quarter-past-three on a haphazard afternoon, like any hour, like any day. They did not want to hold it close, imprisoned and secure, as I did. They were not afraid."

“He sat down on the grass and looked at the lake. The surface of the water seemed taut for some mysterious reason; there was something hidden beneath it, producing a delicious suspense.  
 
‘That’s how it is,’ thought Hual. ‘Many things lie hidden underwater: the sublime forms of beauty, which I cannot even imagine. And the worst of it is that now, right now, they are being made and unmade. Everything is irretrievable. And beauty always dissolves before it is seen.’
 
Then it occurred to him that perhaps there was nothing under the water.”

"You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over."

I was born the year the stars fell. My father was Wolf Calf of the Black-Patched Moccasins, who was born at the end of the dog days and lived all the way through Starvation Winter but not as long as the Sweet Grass Hills Treaty or the Ceded Strip one, and my mother was Curly Hair Woman of the Small Robes, who had been taken from the Snakes as a child, and was my father’s third and youngest wife. She died when I was born. I used to tell myself that, through the smoke-hole of the birthing lodge, she was seeing those long bright streaks in the sky that I only saw in Otter Goes Back’s winter count, when he would unroll it every year and explain to us all the years before, his voice going up and down with them like a buffalo runner racing across the hills, faster and faster.

The last time I saw that winter count, a girl and her little brother were holding it above them to try to keep the freezing rain off, and, because I was an enemy to them, the girl was holding her hand tight around a long knife, not because that could have worked against me, but because she was Pikuni, and Pikuni fight even when the fight’s over. That’s why your Great Father still hasn’t been able to stamp us all out like he wants, no matter how many soldiers he sends.

Also in that same year on Otter Goes Back’s winter count was Spotted Elk getting his fancy uniform from the American generals, that started the bad times with the Kainais. This was before the Medicine Line cut the soldiers but not us off from the Real Old Man Country.

I was in my fourth winter when the white scabs came for us the second time, when we should have hidden from it in the mountains like the Crow. That’s what these scars are from. They mean I lived. I was fourteen winters when so many of the Pikuni got baptized by one of you Black Robes, but I wasn’t in Big River for that. I was sick from drinking whitehorn milk at the fort. My father had warned me not to, but I did it anyway. I was twenty two winters by the time of Lame Bull’s Treaty on Yellow River that gave us our hunting grounds for ninety nine years, which still aren’t over. This is right after the dry time when we had to eat dogs. I had two wives and two daughters and a son during these years, a full lodge, but they were all sent to the Sandhills at the same time from a raid by the Black Paint People. We made them cry for that, and never let them hunt Three Forks again, when there were still blackhorns there. Now they can hunt there all they want.

The next time the white scabs came for the Pikuni was the same winter the soldiers shot our elders and children sick in their lodges, but I wasn’t in Heavy Runner’s camp on the Bear River that morning, and I wasn’t in Mountain Chief’s camp either, which is who the soldiers were looking for. I was up in the Backbone of the World, dragging an iron cage to Ninastako, the Great Chief, Chief Mountain, which is so high that I still look for it from all the way down here. Or, I feel it watching me, which is how all Pikuni feel.

I can see your lips counting that I’m now nearly eighty winters, and I can also see that you don’t believe this.

You will.

"It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."

Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunch-backed makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed from kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries' vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers, heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters' sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottle-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night's rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

"Life occasionally made me belong, as if to give me the measure of what I have lost by not belonging. And then I realized: to belong is to live. I felt this with the thirst of someone lost in the desert, gulping down the last drops of water in a canteen. And then the thirst returns, and I’m walking through the same desert."

The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that air and earth muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it—straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him—goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did not know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was nothing. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor.

He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor—its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with blades—not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And pulled behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind the harrows, the long seeders—twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gears, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift through his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

"I do not know that I have ever, in this world of selfishness and ambition in which I lived, met a mind so void of any thought of the public welfare as his. I have seen a crowd of men disturbing the country in order to raise themselves: that is an everyday perversity; but he is the only one who seemed to me always ready to turn the world upside down in order to divert himself. Neither have I ever known a mind less sincere, nor one that had a more thorough contempt for the truth. When I say he despised it, I am wrong: he did not honour it enough to heed it in any way whatever. When speaking or writing, he spoke the truth or lied, without caring which he did, occupied only with the effect he wished to produce at the moment."

Inside the heads of owls and weasels there are jewels that will effect a cure for ague, for colic. Lightning is the spend of God that strikes an ash tree, where His seeds grow up, with rounded heads and slender tails, between the roots. A woman or a man may take these spendings in their mouth, and after have the Sight, so that they may put all their thoughts into a fire, to travel with its smoke towards the sky. Here they will meet with stork or heron that will bear them up until the Great Cathedral may be apprehended, with its perfect vaulted ceilings formed from naught but Law and Number. I have swallowed my own piss, and I have seen these things.

"There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one."

The silence was manifest in everything; it appeared and disappeared, soft as the air and sometimes hard as stone. Duval breathed, deeply; he breathed as he had never done before, with a kind of tentative belief in life’s reality. At this point in the boredom of the journey, the engineer was suddenly surprised to find himself counting his breaths. He felt that he had discovered the most primitive use of numbers, and thought that if he could keep count of those movements of subtle air, he would arrive at the number of the earth, and silence, and the horses’ fear, and he went on murmuring nebulous numbers to the rhythms of his chest and head. In fact he had lost count right from the start, but that didn’t stop him feeling that it was, precisely, a calculation. He liked to think of it not as an accumulation over time but as the determination of a fundamental unit: a precise, slow, motionless division that he was performing with atmospheric silences. The mathematical fantasies that made the trivial tedium of life in the desert bearable found their natural object in breath’s little butterflies, in that double constancy: inhalation, exhalation.

He was watching with absorbed interest a stately parade of prize stallions, who, adorned with ribbons and other marks of distinction, ambled poderously by, one after another, as if they were parading in some gigantic super-equine festival that ought to have had super-human spectators! The creatures looked so powerful and contemptuous beside the stablemen who led them that Wolf, as he approached this procession, saw for a moment the whole human race in an inferior and ignominious light - saw them as some breed of diabolically-clever monkeys, who, by a debased trick of cunning, had been able to reduce to servitude, though not to servility, animals far nobler and more godlike than themselves.

In the strong twilight over the Mountains of Wales, draining of light League upon League of darkly forested Peaks…to the eye familiar, the occasional interruption of a Cabin or Plantation…chimney Smoke, a gray patch of girdl’d Trees amid the green pervading…a Shade ascending one hollow at a time, the wind acquires at the Dark a potency it did not possess in the light. An ax-bit’s blow quench’d in living wood. A dog after a Squirrel. A percussive “Sandwich” of hammer, anvil, and the Work between. Night over all this watershed how vast, that covers each soul in it like a breathing Mouth, humid, warm, carrying the odors of living and dying, that takes back ev’rything committed upon the Land that Day, without appeal, dissolving all in shadow.

They began their journey down the Rannoch:

It was a land of immense, barely-populated glacial moors, flanked by the tall hills—of bogs and peat-streams—of granite boulders split from the Mountains of Monar during slow, unimaginable catastrophes of ice, deposited to wear away in the beds of wide, fast, shallow rivers;

Of bright green moss, and coarse, olive-green grass, and delicate, washed-out winter flowers discovered suddenly in the lee of low, worn drumlins—of bent thorn and withered bullace, of damp prevailing winds that searched for voices in stands of birch and pine;

Of skylines, wrinkled with ridges;

Of heather and gorse, grey cloud and weather—of sudden open stretches of white water that would swell in Spring, dwindle and vanish with the coming of Summer—mysterious waterways;

It was green and brown, green and grey; it grew no crops; it constituted one quarter of the Empire of Viriconium.