Wolf said: “This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where we are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.”
But the skull answered, “To turn the world again into mist and vapour is easy and weak. To keep it alive, to keep it real, to hold it at arm’s length, is the way of gods and demons.”
Wolf cried out: “There is no reality but what the mind fashions out of itself. There is nothing but a mirror opposite a mirror, and a round crystal opposite a round crystal, and a sky in water opposite water in a sky.”
“Ho! Ho!” laughed the hollow skull. “I am alive still, though I am dead; and you are dead, though you’re alive. For life is beyond your mirrors and your waters. It’s at the bottom of your pond; it’s in the body of your sun; it’s in the dust of your star spaces; it’s in the eyes of weasles and the noses of rats and the pricks of nettles and the tongues of vipers and the spawn of frogs and the slime of snails. Life in me still; and honey is sticky and tears are salt, and yellow-hammers’ eggs have mischievous crooked scrawls!”
—From the divine
Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys [with slight edits for brevity]
