And nothing were all these nothings, they were not serious in the nature of them, taken together. The only unit it was possible to regard with seriousness was the smallest one of all: those seven times sixty seconds during which one held the thermometer between one’s lips and continued one’s curve⁠—they, indeed, were full of matter and tenacious of life; they could expand into a little eternity; they formed small concretions of high density within the scurrying shadows of time’s general course.