stanza my stone

"The answer to all questions of life and death, ‘the absolute solution’ was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveller realising that the wild country he surveyed is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one’s father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language."

— Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight