A muted morning on Harris Creek, grey and silent. These are perfect conditions for solitude. I am thinking of Goldman in Hesse's book Goldman and Narcissus wandering through the countryside during the plague, and coming upon a house in which all of the former occupants have become sculptures of the agony of "black death." I imagine a profound solitude in that scene, that is, I imagine Goldman's experience as one of solitude.

It is not that time has stopped for Goldman, but the space through which Goldman and time move is inanimate, a space abstracted from time. It is as close as Goldman can get to death without being dead. Except for Goldman, all the players on the stage are frozen in that last tick of the clock. They have become art objects, and Goldman is walking alone in a museum. The pleasure of solitude is in that image.