franzen, p. 11-12
"he turned to the doorway where she'd appeared. he began a sentence: "i am--" but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he'd entered, he would realize that the crumbs he'd dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn't quite see in the darkness, as if the darkness weren't uniform, weren't an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he'd encountered the word "crepuscular" in mckay's treasury of english verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he'd seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay...[al] might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he'd entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods -- "packing my suitcase," he heard himself say. this sounded right. verb, possessive, noun. here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. he'd betrayed nothing...

...she berated him then, and for a while the crepuscular birds retreated, but outside the wind had blown the sun out, and it was getting very cold."