There was,” Gracq observed in 1971, “the sentiment of a void, the sense of an enormous blank. Nothing occurred: there was an utterly somnambulistic aspect to everything. For everything continued as if nothing had happened. There was a paralysis, a putting-in-parenthesis, a prelude—to what? No one knew. It was pure anticipation.

Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, loc. 21