Brandon Alan’s Reviews > A Voice Through a Cloud > Status Update

Surely that was the way to look at things - to eat them up with your eyes for what they were, then pass on, but never to chain them together in a silly pattern. The idea of a pattern was only satisfying if it was to be utterly unknowable and mysterious to human beings.

We were two caskets walking close together on the beach with all our secrets locked away and never to be mingled. The sides of the caskets could bump against each other, but that only made the division between the contents more sharp and striking.

I began to long, as I had before, for some special smell, some special music that would fill me, lift me up and carry me away, float me off the rocks of my body and sweep me into some wideness, some vast expanse of blue-grey nothingness.

"Be quiet, it is ordinary," I told myself; "you cannot appreciate the ordinary because you are not normal tonight; but one day you will want dullness and no help from the outside - for only in dullness can your heart and mind grow, and only when other people and events leave you alone will you be able to feel that there is anything inside you at all...

I had come with such pain and labour to a place where emptiness had arrived before me. I was too late, something black and hollow had overtaken me and wriggled through the door first.