He stood at the foot of the invisible bridge, with Time howling around him. He was filled with dread. He could see nothing beyond the abyss. He couldn’t even see the other side of the bridge. He could no longer imagine his destination.
As he stood there, transfixed by the impossibility of going back or moving forward, he became aware that things were disappearing around him. An inscrutable mist seemed to be effacing the glass cupolas, the golden spires, the palace of mirrors, and the splendid marble facades of the island’s incomparable streets. The mist seemed to be wiping out the divine forms which he had glimpsed in the moonlit air. As the mist effaced the colonnades and the marvellous ruins, the glowing hills and the chessboard universe, he realised to his horror that even the road behind him was becoming nothingness.
Time howled from the abyss as the creeping emptiness slowly enveloped the visible world. The emptiness began to devour even the sounds in the air and the mirages that his eyes had conjured in the mist.
‘I did not come from nothing, and I will not die in nothing,’ he said to himself.
But nothingness was blooming all about him in his unwillingness to cross the invisible bridge. Soon the empty spaces creeping towards him became a sort of white wind. The white wind blew away the foundations of the street, blew away the cypress trees, and even the gaps between things, upon which he had fixed his gaze, in the vain hope that while things disappeared the gaps between them would remain.
‘I will not die in nothing,’ he said again, as he watched the world slide away from him into an avalanche of invisibility.
Soon he felt himself standing on the last remaining patch of earth in the whole world. Soon he felt himself on the last ledge of a precipice. Soon he felt his senses falling under the beautiful seduction of the abyss. Out of its enigma he heard soft susurrations and gentle whispers, as of voices murmuring consolations to the last man on earth, who thought himself damned. But when he listened more attentively he thought he could distinguish low songs, sweet tender choruses of the abyss calling him into the happy home of the world-effacing white wind.
For a moment, he was blissful. For a moment, he was seduced. The abyss seemed the perfect place to rest, the safest harbour from so much anxious questing after visibility. It seemed the true home he had been seeking all his life. Slowly, in his mind first, be began to succumb to sleep. Slowly, in his body next, he felt himself falling. There was a grace and a loveliness in his dream of falling. Then, just before he succumbed completely to the song of the abyss, it occurred to him that the nothingness that was devouring the visible world was now beginning to devour him.
In the space of a moment, he felt himself turning to stone. In the space of another moment, he saw himself as a negative statue, with a vacuous happiness on his face. The vision filled him with horror.
‘No, I was not born into nothing,’ he cried to himself, as he made one last effort to rally his mind.
And when he looked about him with eyes already heavy-lidded with the sweetness of falling, what he saw made him cry out with infernal dread. Years later, he would remember that terror also has its enchantment and its uses. It was the terror of what he saw that probably woke him up to the last moment of his old life.