Even the silence that surrounded him was like an end in itself, it might have endured as it was for ever; no one spoke a word, the room, filled with the silence, strangely emptied by the silence, seemed to extend beyond its own walls, and the yellow sunlight outside the open door flowed past like an eternal immeasurable river on whose banks they were sitting.
-
…it was in a sense an incorporeal serenity, a kind of etherealized, luminous, almost white serenity that expanded in the dark room and spread over the confusion of voices, like a network of tinkling glass in a strangely abstract simplification. The stream of sunlight shimmered outside like a sharp fiery sword; they were safe as in a haven of refuge, in a cave, a cellar, a catacomb.
-
The major may have joined in the singing, but he did not know it, the singing seemed rather to be inside him, a singing behind his closed eyes, like a crystalline drop that falls singing from a cloud.
...
~ Hermann Broch, The Realist, in The Sleepwalkers
