"In the last month of winter," she began, almost as though she were talking only to the cat at her feet, "which is the first of spring, the ice on the river, which had been solid and could bear weight, broke up and floated away in great clashing chunks, which makes a pretty sight.

"The ice asked: How is it that the river could accomplish such a thing? And the river might answer: Ice set itself a task it could not finish, and all that was left undone remained the river; and for the undoing of what you did do, well, it wasn't I at all but time and changes, and I am left.

Serenity. Now you could wish for that, naming no conditions: a permanent inner vacation, escape made good. To somehow have this motionlessness that he drew in with the sweet air he inhaled for his inward weather always.

But there were problems too with wishing for moral qualities, serenity, large-mindedness. The interdiction (which Pierce thought obvious) against wishing for such things as artistic abilities — sit down at the piano, the Appassionata flows suddenly from your fingertips — applied in a way to wisdom too, to enlightenment, to heart-knowledge, useless unless earned, the earning of it being no doubt all that it consisted of.

And lastly, the vastest circle, the infinity, the center point — Faëry, ladies and gentlemen, where the heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea beyond sea and there is no end to possibility —