“Only the individual who is solitary is placed under the deepest laws like a Thing, and when he walks out into the rising dawn or looks out into the event-filled evening and when he feels what is happening there, all situations drop from him as if from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of pure life.”

” WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. “

” (…) Then the music ended and I wandered through the crowd for a while, trying to look at people’s faces and into their eyes, to see what I could see. But soon the people got into their trucks and the sidewalk was empty except for the neon, and soon that was gone too.
So I wandered around by myself in the night for a while, I looked at the big orange moon coming up over the fields,
I watched a toad hop across a parking lot, and I waited to become 31. ”