This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.
Nothing, my dear and clever colleague, is not your run-of-the-mill nothing, the result of idleness and inactivity, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness, that is to say, perfect, unique, ubiquitous, in other words Nonexistence, ultimate and supreme.
But the universe, as a collection of finite things, presents itself as a kind of island situated in a pure vacuity to which time, regarded as a series of mutually exclusive moments, is nothing and does nothing.
Man ought always to have something that he prefers to life; otherwise life itself will seem to him tiresome and void.
By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life.
It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing.
When we awake it is the animal, the plant, that thinks in us. Primitive thought without the least disguise. We see a terrible universe, because we see clearly. A little later, intelligence introduces its impeding contrivances. It brings the little toys which man invents in order to hide the void. It is then that we think we are seeing clearly. We attribute our uneasiness to the miasmas of the brain as it passes from dream to reality.
I did not like the nothing, and it is thus that I met the empty, the deep empty, the depth of the blue.
What terrible fear causes Man to address the Void as Thou?
Think then what it is to live on here eternally and yet be human; toage in soul and see our beloved die and pass to lands whither we maynot hope to follow; to wait while drop by drop the curse of the longcenturies falls upon our imperishable being, like water slow drippingon a diamond that it cannot wear, till they be born anew forgetful ofus, and again sink from our helpless arms into the void unknowable.
The outcome of my days is always the same; an infinite desire for what one never gets; a void one cannot fill; an utter yearning to produce in all ways, to battle as much as possible against time that drags us along, and the distractions that throw a veil over our soul.
