“What I really am is dead,” he kept saying to himself. “That’s what I am⁠ ⁠… dead .” But out of his balanced indifference, like a man astride of a floating log, who by a miracle has escaped a whirlpool, he began to feel conscious of a faint satisfaction in the mere fact of having experienced that rush of the cold air about his ears and that splash of froth upon his cheek.

What he had to do now was to gather his forces together for a daily and nightly dialogue with the Cause of all Life and of all Death! As he came along into the outlying district of Blacksod, he visualized this Cause as an enormous shellfish placidly breathing in and breathing out on the floor of a sea-like infinity.

He was staring at its fixed, idiotic eyes, and at its long, motionless antennae, when he passed the turn to the Malakite shop. Then something in him, beyond all reasoning, loosened, stirred, leapt up.⁠ ⁠… “Oh, Christie! Oh, my little Christie!”