Twilight of the Spirit

“Silence. Such silence that even grasshoppers freeze in the thick, vivid green grass, while birds fly over the park without a sound, without a single cry. In the distance, where the trees part, a valley opens up—blue, bluish-gray, misty, light—as if beyond it the edge of the world is already beginning. Above the valley there are white clouds; clouds both over the park and over the house, yet the sky still seems infinitely high: the valley is too deep below, and the gaze carries all the way to the horizon, to the edge of the world. Dmitry Vasilyevich Shadrov looked at the striped terrace awning, gathered in folds, at the whitish sky above the misty valley and above the nearby curly, dark-green trees of the park…”