Here was the one incomprehensible, stupefying fact: nothing else mattered.

Every plan he had ever had, every design which he had made his own by an originality that even his foes acknowledged, were passing before his brain in swift procession, shining, magnified, and magnificent, and in that sudden clear-seeing of his soul he beheld their full value, their exact concrete force and ultimate effect.

Yet he knew himself detached from them, inactive, incapable, because he could not see with the eyes of the body.

The great essential thing to him was that one thing he had lost.

A man might be a cripple and still direct the great concerns of life and the business of life.