"All this did not surprise me at all. Rather, I felt it was something I had always known, yet something inexpressibly flat and disillusioning. 'Of course!' I said to myself, or thought, or whatever may have been my mode of cognition--'Of course! That is it, and that is all! Souls are indeed immortal--why should we ever have imagined otherwise? They are immortal, and what of it? I see the death-side now as I saw the life-side then; and one has as little meaning as the other. As it has been, so it will be, now, henceforth, and for ever, in and out, in and out, without pause or stint, futile, trivial, silly, stale, tedious, monotonous, and vain!' The long pre-occupation of men with religion, philosophy, and art, seemed to me now as incomprehensible as it was ridiculous. There was nothing after all to be interested about! There was simply this! The dreariness of my mood was indescribable, and corresponded so closely to the scene before me that I found myself wondering which was effect, which cause. The silence, the tracts of unformed space, the unsubstantial river, the ceaseless vibration along its surface of infinite moving points, all this was a reflex of my thoughts and they of it. My misery was Intolerable; to escape became my only object; and with this in view I rose and began to move, I knew not whither, along the silent shore. "As I went, I presently became aware of what looked like high towers standing along the margin of the stream. I say they looked like towers, but I should rather have said they symbolized them; for they had no specific shape, round or square, nor any definite substance or dimensions. They suggested rather, if I may say so, the idea of verticality; and otherwise were as blank and void of form or colour as everything else in this strange land. I made my way towards them along the bank; and when I had come close under the first, I saw that there was a door in it, and written over the door, in a language I cannot now recall, but which then I knew that I had always known, an inscription whose sense was: "'_I am the Eye; come into me and see_.'