With dispassionate despair, with entire disillusionment, I surveyed the dust dance; my life, my friends’ lives, 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 or red and lose their summits and billow this way and that, mutable, vain. I, carrying my notebooks, 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 visionlesss, through a world weightless, without illusion?