So little comes down to us, when we try to grasp it.  We are born, and born again, into worlds that shift in ways we cannot begin to imagine, for the single reason that they were made while our minds were occupied elsewhere.  What we feel is incidental slips away, and we only later realise that the incidental was the point.  We lose so much by not paying attention.
    The thing about losing things, reflected Magnus Solaris, was that one didn't miss them until the lack of them turned around and bit.
    His debilitation, once started, had run its course quickly.  For as long as he could remember, he had been able to send his mind and will out into his City, with no more effort and thought than if he were moving his hand.  And now it was as if he were suddenly blinded, the nerves controlling that hand abruptly severed.  It was impossible to recapture the trick of it.
    Worse, it was becoming increasingly difficult to remember how it had felt.
    Through the windows of the Gutter Palace, when one pulled back the drapes, the City seemed as it ever had: bright and perfect and eternal.  There seemed a lack of depth to the vista, however: a sense that it was merely that, an image painted on some putative arrangement of scaffolding and to all real intents no thicker than a breath.  No sense whatsoever of what might lie behind it.
    Or what might lie in general.