"The door of the bar opened, showing him a momentary oblong of true daylight, blankly white. A woman entered. He couldn't see her face as she crossed… - John Crowley

There are things in your past, preserved in memory almost by chance, that only later on, because of the course your own life takes, come to seem proleptic, or significant, or fascinating, when other things don’t.

Not until the lamp is utterly shattered,” she said, “and all pages everywhere sealed up in mildew — but then one would only cease to be, wouldn’t one? Till then, simply changelessness. How deliciously restful. It’s what one wanted, isn’t it, what one had prepared for and sought after — what one had invented out of all the terrible longings and dissatisfactions, never knowing that this exactly was what one was inventing — and yet having no other reason, all along, but this. How pleasant and odd that it should be so….

And that's the last chapter of the history of the world: in which we create, through the workings of the imagination, a world that is uncreated: that is the work of no author. A world that imagination cannot thereafter alter, not in its deepest workings and its laws, but only envision in new ways; where our elder brothers and sisters, the things, suffer our childish logomantic games with them and wait for us to grow up, and know better; where we do grow up, and do know better.