So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.

Why have I so little control? It is the case of much waste and pain in my life.

Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.

But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.

I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.

Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.

We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.