It was as if his point of view had, within seconds, gone from that of an ant to that of an eagle.
For the sky was hollow, and the world was round.

I guessed he experienced the terrible confusion of a true solipsist when the outer world impinges.

With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.

All out of doors looked darkly in at him Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars, That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.

And then we saw him bolt. We heard the miniature thunder where he fled, And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and gray, Like a shadow across instead of behind the flakes.

With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.

you could no more see him in the light that you do than you could rise out of that box and fly through those windows.

He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything, as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of ant feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust

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.

Thought failed him, and he returned to realities.

He relapsed into a silence in which his hopes scattered like mice into holes.

And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird's first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare.

His image shifted jerkily once, twice. She caught the sound of his voice deconstructed into halting and meaningless syllables. And then the window went dark.

It seemed only a few minutes later that he woke with a sense that the world was coming apart.