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"He squatted and shat. Bird flew. He wiped himself with a stick and rose and pulled his trousers up from the ground. Already green flies clambered over his dark and lumpy stool. He buttoned his trousers and went back to the house." One of the great prose stylists of the 20th century.

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"The joy of the birdcatcher would be more sincere if it were a soul he had captivated, but does one ever know? How can one pierce through the metempsychoses and assure oneself whether the prey is animated by the divine breath?" -- from The Dress by Remy de Gourmont

"A symbol has all the power of those who, believing in it, give it its magnetic force: the sign of the cross made by a saint represents, even physically, a force equivalent to thousands of horsepowers. He who makes the sign with all his being becomes the capacitor of all the psychonervous transmissions of which he is the pentacle" from Peladan's Ritual of Love

"Emily, lost in thought, strolled on without observing whither, till she perceived the sounds sinking afar off and an awful stillness round her, except that, sometimes, the nightingale beguiled the silence with liquid notes that close the eye of day."

So far, nothing but long-winded descriptions of nature and one-dimensional characters that are either goodies or baddies. At least Otranto -- Udolpho's Gothic predecessor which also has flat characters -- has the virtue of brevity. The characters in Otranto feel archetypal, like figures in a fairy tale. If you're going to use so many words describing how characters feel, at least make them interesting!

"The logos is what human beings are continually amidst and what they are away from all the same, absently present; they are thus the axunetoi, those who do not grasp."

The reality is that dying isn't bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time all. I know that sounds like a contradiction, or maybe just wordplay. What it really is, it turns out, is a matter of perspective.

"...that monotonous state of the soul halfway between fulfilment and futility that comes with life in the country... In the country, the gods still come to people. A man matters, his experiences matter, but in the city, where experiences come by the thousands, we can no longer relate them to ourselves; and this is of course the beginning of life's notorious turning into abstraction"