Why this was not a month!⁠—Why talk of days⁠—or weeks⁠—or months⁠—I must grasp years in my imagination, if I would truly picture the future to myself⁠—three, five, ten, twenty, fifty anniversaries of that fatal epoch might elapse⁠—every year containing twelve months, each of more numerous calculation in a diary, than the twenty-five days gone by⁠—Can it be? Will it be?⁠—We had been used to look forward to death tremulously⁠—wherefore, but because its place was obscure? But more terrible, and far more obscure, was the unveiled course of my lone futurity. I broke my wand; I threw it from me. I needed no recorder of the inch and barleycorn growth of my life, while my unquiet thoughts created other divisions, than those ruled over by the planets⁠—and, in looking back on the age that had elapsed since I had been alone, I disdained to give the name of days and hours to the throes of agony which had in truth portioned it out.