Then I came across the line Little spider, why are you afraid to leave your web? and suddenly it occured to me how incredible it was that, despite having free will, people were often incapable of altering the course of their lives or even straying from a purely circumstantial narrative.

The mind is a strange thing: it works in secret. Oftentimes the most important decisions in life are made while you're not paying attention.

At this height the world seemed fixed and unreal, without the complications of before and after. Even the string of eagles and few daring crows tracing the slow-moving air currents high up in the mercurial blue seemed stangley stuck in time, their long ellipses suggesting a state of being in which things always were, again and again, from past into present, and from present back into past.