“I stood looking at this simple scene. I thought, out loud most probably: ‘It's the same as it was thirty years ago. . . .’ I thought back to that date: a recent enough time in other countries, but already a remote one in this fast-changing part of the world. Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for it a small, close affection, a bird-size affection; but most probably there was no other sound in this vertiginous silence than the equally timeless sound of the crickets. The facile thought I am in eighteen hundred and . . . ceased being a set of approximate words and deepened into a reality. I felt dead, I felt myself an abstract perceiver of the world; I felt an indefinite fear imbued with science, the clearest metaphysics. I did not believe I had gone upstream on the presumed Waters of Time. No. Rather, I suspected I was in possession of the reticent or absent sense of the inconceivable word eternity. Only later did I succeed in defining this piece of imagination.