At times a sort of sad and valedictory feeling would come over him, as if he were done with life, or were soon to be done with it. Taking a brief survey of his surroundings he would say to himself that yes, he could bear to part with this all, and he would stoically master the wave of beauty and depth that descended on his world at these words. He'd entered into life in the most ordinary, most open-eyed way, and played his various acts, burned up or at least singed all the desires that drove him into a hardened belief in it, now few seemed to remain. If the world now seemed slightly removed it was because the questions it was able to answer for him, and to raise, and to keep raising, had subsided. He had not willed this, except perhaps in his latest commitment to neutral observation, but there was a decided cooling and he felt that he'd suddenly grown old. It seemed as though there were a great many worlds in his past and that he would rarely be reborn in the same one, so many that they were mostly nameless. Had attained a degree of neutrality? How could that possibly be determined? Neutrality was only relative, but then it was impossible to know the face it was directed towards. Or perhaps it was a change in the sense of time, the image or version of himself translated into the future in a cloudy aura of possible fulfilments was not there to lend its drive to the onward flow. It had been replaced by something inward and backward-looking, scenes from childhood, lost or forgotten portions of being which when restored seem to have never been absent, to have only been unnoticed, forming part of the very flavour of the standing now.