Dusk View Quotes

I do need that time, though, for Naoko's face to appear. And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute-like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness. There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand-ever more distant from the spot where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a movie. Each time is appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. "Wake up," it says. "I'm still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I'm still here." The kicking never hurts me. There's no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. And even that is bound to fade one day. At the Hamburg airport, though, the kicks were longer and harder than usual. Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

She watched with a crashing surge of pride as he reached up and pulled the mask off—he was in full sunlight. The orangey red light of the setting sun outlined him. Poughkeepsie’s dusk set the mood. No matter how much Blake healed, Livia had a feeling nighttime would always be their favorite. He disappeared from view, but she knew he was strong. So much stronger so much sooner than she could ever have hoped.

Now by the Path I Climbed, I Journey Back Now by the path I climbed, I journey back. The oaks have grown; I have been long away. Taking with me your memory and your lack I now descend into a milder day; Stripped of your love, unburdened of my hope, Descend the path I mounted from the plain; Yet steeper than I fancied seems the slope And stonier, now that I go down again. Warm falls the dusk; the clanking of a bell Faintly ascends upon this heavier air; I do recall those grassy pastures well: In early spring they drove the cattle there. And close at hand should be a shelter, too, From which the mountain peaks are not in view.

XXIV. And more than that - a furlong on - why, there! What bad use was that engine for, that wheel, Or brake, not wheel - that harrow fit to reel Men's bodies out like silk? With all the air Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel. XXV. Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, Next a marsh it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes and off he goes!) within a rood - Bog, clay and rubble, sand, and stark black dearth. XXVI. Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim, Now patches where some leanness of the soil's Broke into moss, or substances like boils; Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils. XXVII. And just as far as ever from the end! Naught in the distance but the evening, naught To point my footstep further! At the thought, A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom friend, Sailed past, not best his wide wing dragon-penned That brushed my cap - perchance the guide I sought. XXVIII. For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountains - with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. How thus they had surprised me - solve it, you! How to get from them was no clearer case. XXIX. Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick Of mischief happened to me, God knows when - In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then Progress this way. When, in the very nick Of giving up, one time more, came a click As when a trap shuts - you're inside the den. XXX. Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left a tall scalped mountain ... Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the sight! XXXI. What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf He strikes on, only when the timbers start. XXXII. Not see? because of night perhaps? - why day Came back again for that! before it left The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay, - Now stab and end the creature - to the heft!' XXXIII. Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears Of all the lost adventurers, my peers - How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years. XXXIV. There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! In a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, And blew. 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.

— If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold. With feathers and scales. Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy you’ll want to breathe with the spiral calls of birds, while your lashing tail still gropes for the waes. You’ll try to haul your weight from simple sea to gravity of land. Caught by the tide, in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments suffocating in both water and air. If love wants you, suddently your past is obsolete science. Old maps, disproved theories, a diorama. The moment our bodies are set to spring open. The immanence that reassembles matter passes through us then disperses into time and place: the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons. The mother who hears her child crying upstairs and suddenly feels her dress wet with milk. Among black branches, oyster-coloured fog tongues every corner of loneliness we never knew before we were loved there, the places left fallow when we’re born, waiting for experience to find its way into us. The night crossing, on deck in the dark car. On the beach wehre night reshaped your face. In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet, moss like velvet spread over splintered forms. The instant spray freezes in air above the falls, a gasp of ice. We rise, hearing our names called home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moon an escutcheon on the shield of sky. The current that passes through us, radio waves, electric lick. The billions of photons that pass through film emulsion every second, the single submicroscopic crystal struck that becomes the phograph. We look and suddenly the world looks back. A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky. — But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate by the rear-view mirror of the moon; if we continue to reach both for salt and for the sweet white nibs of grass growing closest to earth; if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we’re also driving through the canyon at night, all around us the hidden glow of limestone erased by darkness; if still we sish we’d waited for morning, we will know ourselves nowhere. Not in the mirrors of waves or in the corrading stream, not in the wavering glass of an apartment building, not in the looming light of night lobbies or on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchen or in the motel where we watched meteors from our bed while your slow film, the shutter open, turned stars to rain. We will become indigestible. Afraid of choking on fur and armour, animals will refuse the divided longings in our foreing blue flesh. — In your hands, all you’ve lost, all you’ve touched. In the angle of your head, every vow and broken vow. In your skin, every time you were disregarded, every time you were received. Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field, mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem. The branch that’s released when the bird lifts or lands. In a summer kitchen. On a white winter morning, sunlight across the bed.

For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, ’Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountains - with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. How thus they had surprised me - solve it, you! How to get from them was no clearer case.

One day a Muslim friend and I were out for the day together. I had forgotten that the Fast of Ramadan had just begun and suggested that we step into a restaurant for a cup of coffee. “I will spend years in jail for that cup of coffee,” he said, so of course I apologized for the suggestion. Then in low tones he admitted that his fast was restricted to public view and that he did not practice it in private. “I cannot work ten hours a day without eating,” he said. There was an awkward silence, and he muttered these words: “I don’t think God is the enforcer of these rules.” As anyone knows who has asked any Muslim, they will admit with a smile upon their faces that during the month of the Fast of Ramadan more food is sold than during any other month of the year. But its consumption takes place from dusk to dawn rather than from dawn to dusk. Legalism always breeds compliance over purpose. In

XXVIII For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, ’Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountains—with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view. How thus they had surprised me—solve it, you! How to get from them was no clearer case. XXIX Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick Of mischief happened to me, God knows when— In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then Progress this way. When, in the very nick Of giving up, one time more, came a click As when a trap shuts—you’re inside the den. XXX Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left a tall scalped mountain . . . Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the sight! XXXI What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world. The tempest’s mocking elf Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf He strikes on, only when the timbers start.

THE MEETING" "Scant rain had fallen and the summer sun Had scorched with waves of heat the ripening corn, That August nightfall, as I crossed the down Work-weary, half in dream. Beside a fence Skirting a penning’s edge, an old man waited Motionless in the mist, with downcast head And clothing weather-worn. I asked his name And why he lingered at so lonely a place. “I was a shepherd here. Two hundred seasons I roamed these windswept downlands with my flock. No fences barred our progress and we’d travel Wherever the bite grew deep. In summer drought I’d climb from flower-banked combe to barrow’d hill-top To find a missing straggler or set snares By wood or turmon-patch. In gales of March I’d crouch nightlong tending my suckling lambs. “I was a ploughman, too. Year upon year I trudged half-doubled, hands clenched to my shafts, Guiding my turning furrow. Overhead, Cloud-patterns built and faded, many a song Of lark and pewit melodied my toil. I durst not pause to heed them, rising at dawn To groom and dress my team: by daylight’s end My boots hung heavy, clodded with chalk and flint. “And then I was a carter. With my skill I built the reeded dew-pond, sliced out hay From the dense-matted rick. At harvest time, My wain piled high with sheaves, I urged the horses Back to the master’s barn with shouts and curses Before the scurrying storm. Through sunlit days On this same slope where you now stand, my friend, I stood till dusk scything the poppied fields. “My cob-built home has crumbled. Hereabouts Few folk remember me: and though you stare Till time’s conclusion you’ll not glimpse me striding The broad, bare down with flock or toiling team. Yet in this landscape still my spirit lingers: Down the long bottom where the tractors rumble, On the steep hanging where wild grasses murmur, In the sparse covert where the dog-fox patters.” My comrade turned aside. From the damp sward Drifted a scent of melilot and thyme; From far across the down a barn owl shouted, Circling the silence of that summer evening: But in an instant, as I stepped towards him Striving to view his face, his contour altered. Before me, in the vaporous gloaming, stood Nothing of flesh, only a post of wood.

That evening around dusk, she hiked up to Maryland Heights and sat on a cliff looking down upon the picturesque little town of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. One hundred seventy years before, Thomas Jefferson called the view “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature.” In a book first published in France, he wrote that the scene alone, the passage of the Potomac River through the Blue Ridge and its crashing merger with the Shenandoah, was worth a trip across the Atlantic.

It would be absurd, a ridiculous myopia, to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today. But it has been a long century, a long dusk of spite and cruelty, the excrescence and essence of its time. Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing that we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.

We needed coffee but we'd got ourselves convinced that the later we left it the better it would taste, and, as the country grew flatter and the roads became quiet and dusk began to colour the sky, you could guess from the way we retuned the radio and unfolded the map or commented on the view that the tang of determination had overtaken our thoughts, and when, fidgety and untalkative but almost home, we drew up outside the all-night restaurant, it felt like we might just stay in the car, listening to the engine and the gentle sound of the wind

AUTHOR’S NOTE Dear reader: This story was inspired by an event that happened when I was eight years old. At the time, I was living in upstate New York. It was winter, and my dad and his best friend, “Uncle Bob,” decided to take my older brother, me, and Uncle Bob’s two boys for a hike in the Adirondacks. When we left that morning, the weather was crisp and clear, but somewhere near the top of the trail, the temperature dropped abruptly, the sky opened, and we found ourselves caught in a torrential, freezing blizzard. My dad and Uncle Bob were worried we wouldn’t make it down. We weren’t dressed for that kind of cold, and we were hours from the base. Using a rock, Uncle Bob broke the window of an abandoned hunting cabin to get us out of the storm. My dad volunteered to run down for help, leaving my brother Jeff and me to wait with Uncle Bob and his boys. My recollection of the hours we spent waiting for help to arrive is somewhat vague except for my visceral memory of the cold: my body shivering uncontrollably and my mind unable to think straight. The four of us kids sat on a wooden bench that stretched the length of the small cabin, and Uncle Bob knelt on the floor in front of us. I remember his boys being scared and crying and Uncle Bob talking a lot, telling them it was going to be okay and that “Uncle Jerry” would be back soon. As he soothed their fear, he moved back and forth between them, removing their gloves and boots and rubbing each of their hands and feet in turn. Jeff and I sat beside them, silent. I took my cue from my brother. He didn’t complain, so neither did I. Perhaps this is why Uncle Bob never thought to rub our fingers and toes. Perhaps he didn’t realize we, too, were suffering. It’s a generous view, one that as an adult with children of my own I have a hard time accepting. Had the situation been reversed, my dad never would have ignored Uncle Bob’s sons. He might even have tended to them more than he did his own kids, knowing how scared they would have been being there without their parents. Near dusk, a rescue jeep arrived, and we were shuttled down the mountain to waiting paramedics. Uncle Bob’s boys were fine—cold and exhausted, hungry and thirsty, but otherwise unharmed. I was diagnosed with frostnip on my fingers, which it turned out was not so bad. It hurt as my hands were warmed back to life, but as soon as the circulation was restored, I was fine. Jeff, on the other hand, had first-degree frostbite. His gloves needed to be cut from his fingers, and the skin beneath was chafed, white, and blistered. It was horrible to see, and I remember thinking how much it must have hurt, the damage so much worse than my own. No one, including my parents, ever asked Jeff or me what happened in the cabin or questioned why we were injured and Uncle Bob’s boys were not, and Uncle Bob and Aunt Karen continued to be my parents’ best friends. This past winter, I went skiing with my two children, and as we rode the chairlift, my memory of that day returned. I was struck by how callous and uncaring Uncle Bob, a man I’d known my whole life and who I believed loved us, had been and also how unashamed he was after. I remember him laughing with the sheriff, like the whole thing was this great big adventure that had fortunately turned out okay. I think he even viewed himself as sort of a hero, boasting about how he’d broken the window and about his smart thinking to lead us to the cabin in the first place. When he got home, he probably told Karen about rubbing their sons’ hands and feet and about how he’d consoled them and never let them get scared. I looked at my own children beside me, and a shudder ran down my spine as I thought about all the times I had entrusted them to other people in the same way my dad had entrusted us to Uncle Bob, counting on the same naive presumption that a tacit agreement existed for my children to be cared for equally to their own.

Have you ever just laid down on the grass and watch as the day slowly transitions to evening? The sky flows through hues of orange and slowly fades to greys, the incredible palette of dusk. This is where the magic begins to happen. First the planets reveal themselves as bright pinpoints of light against the bleak canvas, and for a few moments they are the only thing you can focus on - they’re so bright that they draw away from anything else. When you stare at only one, when there is so much distance between it and anything else, it almost seems to be dancing back and forth in space, playing mind tricks on you. However, as you emerge from its hypnotic trance, you begin to see the less significant stars awaken from what seems like nowhere. They too earn your attention, but in a different way. You can’t look at them directly because otherwise you won’t see their beauty. You have to glance at them from the side, from the corner of your eye to really see them in their fullness. The sky is not yet completely in darkness and the universe is already showing off. Distant stars even further light years away and planets orbiting from afar being to emerge and before you know it you almost don’t know where to look, there are little grains of sand lighting up the sky from everywhere. This happens every night - a spectacular natural light show but so many people miss it. It’s sad to think that, but it makes viewing it that much more special when you get to experience it. Just you and the universe, watching itself through your own very eyes.

The sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too soon needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute—like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness. There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand—ever more distant from the spot where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a movie. Each time it appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind. “Wake up,” it says. “I’m still here. Wake up and think about it. Think about why I’m still here.” The kicking never hurts me. There’s no pain at all. Just a hollow sound that echoes with each kick. And even that is bound to fade one day.

Past the projects, the land opened up and water came into view. The breeze carried rain and salt. Jetties and barrier walls supported the shore, which was stacked with crumbling brick warehouses. Out in the channel, the Statue of Liberty stood alone on her little island, her corroding flame held high in the air as the sun set over the industrial shoreline and skyways of New Jersey. Across the narrows, the bluffs of Staten Island wavered in the smoky light of dusk that turned the Verrazano into bronze. Faint light burnished water into busy with freighters and tug boats. A lone sail boat flitted in the distance. On the near shore, on a slip of water between a jetty and the land, a blood red barge bobbed on the tide.

And as the years have passed, the time has grown longer. The sad truth is that what I could recall in 5 seconds all too soon needed 10, then 30, then a full minute - like shadows lengthening at dusk. Someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness. There is no way around it: my memory is growing ever more distant from the spot where Naoko used to stand - where my old self used to stand. And nothing but scenery, that view of the meadow in October, returns again and again to me like a symbolic scene in a film. Each time it appears, it delivers a kick to some part of my mind.

Friction thus caused delay and confusion. Action in war became like walking in water, and vision was regularly obscured. “All actions take place in something virtually akin to dusk, which in addition, like fog or moonlight, gives objects an exaggerated size and a grotesque view.

the famous remark of Hegel that ‘the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk’”—Hegel’s view that wisdom comes only in hindsight.

Their friendship — they were both of them careful to insist upon that word — was a thing elusive and moth-like, an unreal emanation of the sweet London dusk from which any intrusion of the material, the physical, might brush the bloom. They were primarily concerned with each other’s minds and souls. This was, they assured each other, an intellectual comradeship in which two young, eager minds, with eyes wide open, were pre- pared to discuss any subject under the sun. With a cold and exalted detachment they debated not only the arts — which, naturally, were much more important than life — but problems of human conduct, such as Communism (they were both Communists, of course), prostitution, birth-control. At first these discussions filled poor Helena with confusion, for no living Pomfret had ever spoken of such things, but Cyril, when he saw her confused, became almost stern. To be capable of being shocked was a bourgeois trait; and when once she had got over her first awkwardness she found a certain elevated excitement in calling spades spades. Cyril noticed this, and approved. It was something of an achievement to have educated this little mouse from Clapham up to his own intellectual level. It made him ruthless, haughty, patronising towards her; and Helena didn’t mind. Indeed, she found an odd satisfaction in the docile humility with which she accepted his views on free trade, free verse and free love. [...] And the beauty of the whole thing was this: that apart from their meeting and parting kisses, which, occasionally, on his side, were disturbingly ardent, their relations, so far, had been rigidly Platonic. He had never, in a vulgar way, attempted to make love to her. They went floating, divided like another and undesirous Paolo and Francesca, through an intellectual heaven. Impersonally. . . . She sometimes wondered how long this blessed impersonality would last [...]

What good part?" Kylie asked. Miranda's grin spread into the perfect smile-one that could be used to sell teeth-whitening strips. "Pleeeassse. You were there, in the dark, late at night, for several hours, and alone with Lucas. Who happens to be the hottest werewolf alive. I mean, I'm so not into werewolves, but even I can see it. He's like a god. So..." She held out her two palms. "What happened? And don't you dare tell me nothing. Because I will totally, completely lose faith in romance if nothing happened." Kylie opened her mouth to answer and then saw Della leaning forward, turning her head slightly, as if to listen to Kylie's heartbeat to see if she attempted to lie. "The little witch has a point," Della said. "This might be the good part." Kylie frowned at Della. For a girl who always kept secrets, she sure didn't give anyone else a break. Then Kylie looked at Miranda, who held her breath in anticipation of Kylie baring her soul. "Sorry," she said. "Nothing happened." "Ugh." Miranda dropped her arms on the table and sank into them. Della stared, and Kylie knew the vamp was listening to her heartbeat and checking for lies again. Frankly, Kylie wasn't sure what Della would hear. It wasn't actually a lie. Nothing happened. Except ... She'd felt so safe when Lucas had held her, except that she'd turned into Wonder Woman when she'd heard the rogue hurting Lucas. What did that mean? Kylie wasn't sure. So how could she explain it? Miranda lifted her head off the table. "See what I mean? You're Mother Teresa. Pure. Without lust." "No," Kylie snapped, not wanting to be viewed as a saint. "I ... lust." Della and Miranda shared a pensive stare. "Sorry," Della said. "When it walks like a saint, and quacks like saint-it's a quacking saint." "He held me," Kylie said. "Held me close. And I fell asleep on his shoulder. It was nice. And kind of ... He was hot." Though she meant temperature hot, she didn't mind if they drew their own conclusions. "Yes!" Miranda smiled extra big again."Did he kiss you? Like the awesome kiss he gave you at the creek when you first got here?" "No," Kylie said. Her two friends met each other's gazes again. "Mother Teresa," they said in unison.

But the light of the European Enlightenment today shines so bright that it covers up much more than it reveals. It is like vision during the day and during the clear night; we can see many details of our earth very clearly by sunlight, which we would not see by the light of the stars or of the moon at night. But during that process of seeing by sunlight we give up the possibility of seeing the night sky with its galazies of stars, the other planets, and the moon. It is only as the daylight fades and the dusk begins to obscure much of the detail we see by day, that the night sky with all its grandeur and splendor comes into view. Our European Enlightenment is something like the daylight, which makes us see many things that we would not have seen without its help; but in that very process of opening up a detailed and clear vision of some things, the daylight, by its very brightness, eclipses the stunningly vast expanse of the billions of galaxies that lie around. It is too bright a light, this European Enlightenment and its critical rationality. If we lived all twenty four hours by sunlight we would miss out on most of reality, which "comes to light" only when the sunlight is dimmed, and when even the moon's reflection of the sunlight is not too forceful." -Paulos Mar Gregorios "A Light Too Bright; The Enlightenment Today

Dusk had fallen on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant, finished her long day’s work in a large department store in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the first capital of the Confederacy. While heading for the bus stop across Court Square, which had once been a center of slave auctions, she observed the dangling Christmas lights and a bright banner reading “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” After paying her bus fare she settled down in a row between the “whites only” section and the rear seats, according to the custom that blacks could sit in the middle section if the back was filled. When a white man boarded the bus, the driver ordered Rosa Parks and three other black passengers to the rear so that the man could sit. The three other blacks stood up; Parks did not budge. Then the threats, the summoning of the police, the arrest, the quick conviction, incarceration. Through it all Rosa Parks felt little fear. She had had enough. “The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed,” she said later. “I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” Besides, her feet hurt. The time had come … Rosa Parks’s was a heroic act of defiance, an individual act of leadership. But it was not wholly spontaneous, nor did she act alone. Long active in the civil rights effort, she had taken part in an integration workshop in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School, an important training center for southern community activists and labor organizers. There Parks “found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.” There she had gained strength “to persevere in my work for freedom.” Later she had served for years as a leader in the Montgomery and Alabama NAACP. Her bus arrest was by no means her first brush with authority; indeed, a decade earlier this same driver had ejected her for refusing to enter through the back door. Rosa Parks’s support group quickly mobilized. E. D. Nixon, long a militant leader of the local NAACP and the regional Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, rushed to the jail to bail her out. Nixon had been waiting for just such a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the bus segregation law. Three Montgomery women had been arrested for similar “crimes” in the past year, but the city, in order to avoid just such a challenge, had not pursued the charge. With Rosa Parks the city blundered, and from Nixon’s point of view, she was the ideal victim—no one commanded more respect in the black community.

This is the old Oak View school, or so they say- but it’s where I see the face of a little girl, like looking back at me all ghostly and crap. They say her name is Lily Anderson, I heard the freaked-up story of the girl falling to her death and crap… we all have, my did pound it into my little head or he says, I will always be his baby, saying I act like one doing what these girls want me to do. So-Oo one day at dusk, I have a flashlight that was on the blink, so freak- it was not working for crap, yet it was something, I was load in I swear I don’t think my feet took me where I need to go, I feel someone was doing the walking for me.

He wanted to be alone, so that's what he is now. ... He wanted the feeling of winning, and now he has a view of a landscape at dusk.

In 2012, when Amanda Melin, a scientist who studies animal vision, met Tim Caro, a scientist who studies animal patterns, their conversation naturally turned to zebras. Caro had become the latest in a long line of biologists to wonder why zebras have such conspicuous black-and-white patterns. One of the earliest and most prominent hypotheses, he told Melin, was that the stripes counterintuitively act as camouflage. They mess with the eyes of predators like lions and hyenas by breaking up the zebra’s outline, or by helping it to blend in among the vertical trunks of trees, or by causing a confusing blur when it runs. Melin was dubious. “I had a look on my face,” she recalls. “I said, ‘I think most of the carnivores are hunting at night, and their visual acuity is going to be so much worse than humans’. They probably can’t see the stripes.’ And Tim went, ‘What?’ ” Humans outshine almost every other animal at resolving detail. Our exceptionally sharp vision, Melin realized, gives us a rarefied view of a zebra’s stripes. She and Caro calculated that on a bright day, people with excellent eyesight can distinguish the black-and-white bands from 200 yards away. Lions can only do so at 90 yards and hyenas at 50 yards. And those distances roughly halve at dawn and dusk, when these predators are more likely to hunt. Melin was right: The stripes can’t possibly act as camouflage because predators can only make them out at close range, by which point they can almost certainly hear and smell the zebra. At most distances, the stripes would just fuse together into a uniform gray. To a hunting lion, a zebra mostly looks like a donkey.[*10]

She smiled. “Prince Erik wonders if Prince Mingyue would like to view the setting of the sun with him over the Qiantang River.” Mingyue found himself blushing at the invitation. Before he could think of a response, however, a voice to his right spoke up in his place.

The brilliant colors and geometric patterns, like a sheen of oil atop a dark puddle, grew more intense as he slid away. Pictures of the world shot through his brain.  He moved his fingers, and he felt the cold stillness of a timeless sky.  Bewildering alien landscapes flickered in and out of view.  Then, he recognized what the landscapes were: insane fractals, never-ending and chaos-infused form.  It was a world somehow constructed or rooted upon the fractal pattern.  As he gazed through his mind’s eye, there was movement far off.  The images changed to pictures of people—more like silhouettes at dusk than clear people, but he felt with certainty that they had been like him once.

The sun had set on Day Five and the blue of dusk was over the horizon of the multi-storey flats. The ashes of Jeffrey's cigarette had gone cold underneath his shoe, as he continued to camp out on Marsiling Hill. This time, he found a park bench by the corner, which did not provide as good a view but still enabled him to look straight into the flat. Suddenly, a figure stirred from the living room window and Jeffrey quickly picked up his binoculars.