The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.

You go back home and everything you wished was different is still the same and everything you wished was the same is different.

Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.

He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.

There is no greater monster than reason.

The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.