The truth was that he felt he had arrived at his life’s true destination. He felt it as a mood of at-homeness. Then he felt that the longing for his true destination was itself the mood of the square.
Suddenly, he had an odd premonition. He sensed that his true destination was a place that he would eventually lose, would set out from, continuing his original search. Then, after finding what he wanted, and discovering that it wasn’t what he really wanted, he would set out, on a sad quest, to the place he had lost, and would never find it again. He felt all this as in a dream.
At that moment, overcome with a dark happiness, he suddenly sensed that all the magic and the blessedness, the enchantment and the mystery, the wisdom of the civilisation and the majesty of the city, all were doomed. They were doomed the way beautiful things are doomed. But doomed in order to become higher, and last forever, in the places where things are most powerful and truly endure, in the living dreams of the universe.