…Cassis, and the smell of the chestnut blossoms. All along the Champs-Elysies the chestnuts were foaming white…

I remembered the play of the fountains in the Place de la Concorde… And down the Rue de la Seine and along the quais, the smell of the old books, the smell of the river… The smell of chestnut blossoms…

Why should I suddenly remember 1905 and Paris on the shadow Earth, save that I was very happy that year and I might, reflexively, have sought an antidote for the present? Yes…

White absinthe, Amer Picon, grenadine… Wild strawberries, with Creme d’Isigny… Chess at the Cafe de la Regence with actors from the Comedie Francaise, just across the way… The races at Chantilly… Evenings at the Boite a Fursy on the Rue Pigalle…

I placed my left foot firmly before my right, my right before my left. In my left hand, I held the chain from which the Jewel depended — and I carried it high, so that I could stare into the stone’s depths, seeing and feeling there the emergence of the new Pattern which I described with each step. I had screwed my staff into the ground and left it to stand near the Pattern’s beginning. Left…

The wind sang about me and there was thunder near at hand. I did not meet with the physical resistance that I did on the old Pattern. There was no resistance at all. Instead — and in many ways worse — a peculiar deliberation had come over all my movements, slowing them, ritualizing them. I seemed to expend more energy in preparing for each step — perceiving it, realizing it and ordering my mind for its execution — than I did in the physical performance of the act. Yet the slowness seemed to require itself, was exacted of me by some unknown agency which determined precision and an adagio tempo for all my movements. Right…