If he is weak enough to grow smaller to fit himself to his covering, then it becomes a process of gradual suicide by shrinkage of the soul.

Darkness thickened and collapsed about him. Some of it never lifted again.

When the mind of man ceases to thrust outward, it begins to contract and wither.

So Man, declining alwayes, disappears
In the weak Circles of increasing Years;
And his short Tumults of themselves Compose,
While flowing Time above his Head does close.

Like plants, so men also grow, some in the light, others in the shadows. There are many who need the shadows and not the light.

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.

He looks at Mama out of the corner of his eye, again surprised by how little she is. As if all of her life has been a slow process of shrinkage.
But just what is that shrinkage?
Is it the real shrinkage of a person abandoning his adult dimensions and starting on the long journey through old age and death toward distances where there is only a nothingness without dimension?

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

So dark the con of man.

An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.

When you spend so long trapped in darkness, Lucien, you find that the darkness begins to stare back.

But you can't stay in the dark for so long. Something inside of you starts to fade and you become like a starving person, crazy-hungry for light.

It is hard that a man's exterior should tally so little sometimes with his soul.

All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.