"Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden, That apparition, sole of men, he saw."

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Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

— Marilynne Robinson