He had, in fact, come upon passages in certain books that approached this ideal, hinting to the reader—almost admonishing him—that the pages before his eyes were about to offer a view from the abyss and cast a wavering light on desolate hallucinations. To become the wind in the dead of winter and howl the undoing of all that would abide in warmth and light. So might begin an enticing verse in a volume of esoterica. But soon the bemazed visionary would falter, retracting the promised flight to emaciated landscapes of unbeing, perhaps offering an apologetics for this lapse into the unreal.
The author seems to be describing his own writing here.
