Xinyu Tan’s Reviews > The Stronghold > Status Update

But at a certain point, almost instinctively, you turn around and see that a gate has been bolted behind you, closing off the way back. You feel something has changed. The sun no longer seems motionless; it’s rather moving rapidly, much to your dismay, leaving you hardly any time to watch it plummet toward the edge of the horizon…You grasp the passage of time and the inevitable end of the journey.

You walk placidly, surveying what lies about you with curiosity…Thus your heart begins to beat with desires, both heroic and tender. You savor the foretaste of the marvelous things that lie in wait farther ahead. You still don’t see them but you’re certain, absolutely certain, that one day you shall reach them.

But if he were told, your entire life would be the same, utterly the same, till the very last moment, even he would be roused. Impossible, he would respond. Something else must come to pass, something truly worthy, enabling him to say, Now, even if I lie at death’s door, I can rest.

For months and months no one would enter, except for the patient dust and on sunny days faint streaks of light. There, shut up in darkness, would lie little world of his boyhood.