Darkness thickened and collapsed about him. Some of it never lifted again.

There was no room in him for curiosity; The capacity for observation had long since starved on the aridness of his soul.

For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

For him no silver cressets shed their light,
No eager joy-bells sounded through the night From city minster, or from village tower;
No loud "hurrahs," sent from deep-chested men,
Lifted the midnight mist from off the glen
In celebration of his natal hour.

Intelligence did not figure largely in anything he did and was often conspicuously absent.

It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

he was doing nothing, thinking of nothing, looking at nothing; he was merely suffering.

But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

...in going to sleep he had learned to vanquish light, and now the light could not rewake him.

Someone, somewhere, had tied up the darkness, he thought as he went: the bag of darkness had been tied at the mouth, enclosing within it a host of smaller bags. The stars were tiny, almost imperceptible perforations; otherwise, there wasn't a single hole through which light could pass.
The darkness in which he walked immersed was gradually pervading him. His own footfall was utterly remote, his presence barely rippled the air. His being had been compressed to the utmost - to the point where it had no need to forge a path for itself through the night, but could weave its way through the gaps between the particles of which the darkness was composed.

He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.

The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum.

There was so much going on, and so little he cared to know about!