On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog’s bark, glimmered in the pale recession… In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.

—Albert Camus, The Plague

The birds have vanished into the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

—Li Po

At the height of three miles, sitting above the clouds, I felt like an airborne seed…And I dreamed down at the clouds, and I thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides, as no other generation of man has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.

—Saul Bellow, “Henderson: The Rain King”

NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY