All men have remarked that night and silence are august, and I think
that if this quality in night and silence be closely examined it will be
found to consist, in part at least, in this: that either of them
symbolizes Absence. By a paradox which I will not attempt to explain,
but which all have felt, it is in silence and in darkness that the Past
most vividly returns, and that this absence of what once was possesses,
nay, obtrudes itself upon the mind: it becomes almost a sensible thing.
There is much to be said for those who pretend, imagine, or perhaps have
experienced under such conditions the return of the dead. The mood of
darkness and of silence is a mood crammed with something that does not
remain, as space remains, that is limited by time, and is a creature of
time, and yet something that has an immortal right to remain.

Now, I suppose that in that sentence where I say things mortal have
immortal rights to permanence, the core of the whole business is touched
upon. And I suppose that the great men who could really think and did
not merely fire off fireworks to dazzle their contemporaries--I suppose
that Descartes, for instance, if he were here sitting at my table--could
help me to solve that contradiction; but I sit and think and cannot
solve it.

"What," says the man upon his own land, inherited perhaps and certainly
intended for his posterity--"what! Can you separate me from this? Are
not this and I bound up inextricably?" The answer is "No; you are not so
far as any observer of this world can discover. Space is in no way
possessed by man, and he who may render a site immortal in one of our
various ways, the captain who there conquered, the poet who there
established his sequence of words, cannot himself put forward a claim to
permanence within it at all."