‘Now a strange mood took hold of me, as I walked silent and alone through the last of the pines and the cypress knees that seemed to float in the black water, the grey moss that coated everything. It was as if I travelled through the landscape with the sound of an expressive and intense aria playing in my ears. Everything was imbued with emotion, awash with it, and I was no longer a biologist but somehow the crest of a wave building and building but never crashing to shore. I saw with new eyes the subtleties of the transition to the marsh, the salt flats. As the trail became a raised berm, dull, algae-choked lakes spread out to the right and a canal flanked to the left. Rough channels of water meandered out in a maze through a forest of reeds on the canal side, and islands, oases of wind-contorted trees, appeared in the distance like sudden revelations.’
from Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
Absence Club 