To a God Unknown

by John Steinbeck

“All the stories, all the incidents that made the life were stopped in a second—opinions stopped, and the ability to feel, all stopped without any meaning.”

“This is the storm,” he thought. “This is the beginning of the thing I knew. There is some cycle here, steady and quick and unchangeable as a fly-wheel.” And the tired thought came to him that if he gazed into the pool and cleaned his mind of every cluttering picture he might come to know the cycle.

“These were words to clothe a naked thing, and the thing is ridiculous in clothes.”