"Walking along the edge of the river, I no longer saw those lovely pale leaves pass me like petals, as if some river flower were blooming oddly out of season (poetry appearing abruptly in my social prose); rather I took them to be elements of a threatening metaphor, because I had suddenly seen that the world was held together only by frost and by freezing, by contraction, that its bowels contained huge compressors and ice-cold molds; so the place where I stood looking over a trivial Indiana landscape—snow freshly falling upon an otherwise turgid, uninteresting stream—was actually a point on the hazardous brink of Being. Consequently there appeared before me an emblem of all that was—all that was like a frozen fog—exhaust from the engines of entropy; and I saw in the whitened leaves floating by me an honesty normally missing from Nature's speech, because this adventitious coating threw open the heart of the Law: this scene of desolation—relieved only by the barren purity of trees—this wedge was all there was; and then I understood that the soft lull of August water was but a blanket on a snowbank; the dust that a wave of wind would raise was merely the ash of a dry summer blizzard; the daffodils which would ring our Chinese elm were blooming spikes of ice, encased in green like a thug's gloves; there was just one season; and when the cottonwoods released their seeds, I would see smoke from the soul of the cold cross the river on the wind to snag in the hawthorns and perish in their grip like every love"

- William H. Gass, The Tunnel - p. 343