She was only a silhouette, swallowed by the darkness, her eyes shining with despair.

The world that our senses and our consciousness habitually acquaint us with is now nothing more than the shadow of itself; and it is cold like death.

Between them she felt small, even smaller than herself. (p13)

How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.

I lost all connection with the outside world and was immersed in a world of darkness. I was scared that my existence would fade silently. No one knew where I was, and no one would ever know. I was just like a small soybean—once fallen to the ground, it rolls into a crack in the corner. Being unable to make any sounds, it will forever be forgotten.

We call out into the distance... Less than a pearl in a sea of stars, we are a lost island in the shadows.

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

It was sad to see his tall figure receding in the dark as we drove away, just like the other figures in New York and New Orleans: they stand uncertainly underneth inmense skies, and everything about them is drowned. Where go? what do? what for? — sleep.

Look, here are we on this starry night staring into space, and I must say I feel as small as dust lying down here.

Earth, left silent by the wind of night, Seems shrunken 'neath the gray unmeasured height.

I only knew that I and my many mothers had been lost in sky, water, and the galaxy, as we rested on a planet so small it was invisible to the turnings of other worlds. (p179)

The stars drew light across the night sky in that little mountain village, and the silence and the cold made the darkness vanish away. It was - I don't know how to explain it - as if everything solid melted away into the ether, eliminating all individualtiy and absorbing us, rigid, into the immense darkness. Not a single cloud to lend perspective to the space blocked any portion of the starry sky.

It was like being lost: very young again, with the dark, and lost. There was no . . . thing . . . to be . . . frightened of, but . . .
We were frightened . . . And there was nothing.

Listen! Do things look in the ten and twelve of noon look as they do in the dark? Is the hand, the face, the foot, the same face and hand and foot seen by the sun? For now the hand lies in a shadow; its beauties and its deformities are in a smoke - there is a sickle of doubt across the cheek bone thrown by the hat's brim, so there is half a face to be peered back into speculation. A leaf of darkness has fallen under the chin and lies deep upon the arches of the eyes; the eyes themselves have changed their colour. The very mother's head you swore by in the dock is a heavier head, crowned with ponderable hair.