Surely some mistake had been made. Color had eked out of the world, leaving only a long, fine gasp of black, grey, and white. I watched from a bridge above an ice-capped lake backdropped by a frozen bellow of mountains and trees and snow. A cabin complex was beginning to blink awake with the arrival of evening: strings of pale yellow Christmas lights; thick, foggy windows. The effect was vulgar. Everything else indicated that we were not supposed to be there. The landscape was alien: somewhere between unfamiliar with and hostile to human life. Exclamation-straight evergreens bore heaping bulbs of snow, dollops of suspended collapse slurring from white to blue to grey with the silent death of day. Pitch-black water sloughed below in the blind-numb deep. All things congealed towards a frozen, endless hush. Perhaps this was our perversion: the idiocy to produce noise in a place such as this. I sensed that if I stood alone on the bridge for long enough with no human interference, the silence would draw each drop of air from my lungs, one by one. I sensed that this landscape predates us and will succeed us and operates now in assent to a whole parallel idea of life in which we never were. It is a peaceful thing over there. Snows swell and melt away, colors bulge and ebb. Coldness has its way with the land; stillness weaves new physics into being, shapes of thought that would rend us in two. I like to believe its currents still course beneath this world. That stillness and silence will have their say yet.