In the first eon he had ever been in some kind of torment, finding the static unendurable when it engulfed him and fearing it would never abate, then, after it had gone away, sensing the possibility that it might never return, stranding him in darkness and silence. But it had now come and gone so many millions of times that he had altogether put aside those fears. The putting of names on things gave him power. He named the static chaos. Chaos was terrible but he had learned the knack of summoning things forth out of it and thereby mastered it. The waves still came and went but the rhythm of their coming and going had become a part of him now. He named them day and night and knew them as being good for different purposes. The day was when new things were drawn forth from chaos, perfected and beheld. The night was for resting, and for the naming of what had been drawn forth during the day.

The street, the park, and the forest had at first wobbled in and out of existence and changed their shapes, but as he made it his way to inhabit them—walking up and down the street, strolling through the park, and looking into the forest—they became steady and ceased changing all the time. Leaves fell to the ground. He had no particular idea as to why this happened. To be a leaf was to fall. Early on, there had been no ground to stop them. For that matter there had been no up or down, just infinities of flickering chaos. But the trees seemed to want to be pointed in the same direction, with trunks down and leaves up, and the trunks had to stop somewhere and the leaves had to land somewhere. In that somewhere he began to see motes that were of a different nature, and yet not red. Beneath the trees’ spreading branches he made the ground all of a color, which was not red but green. Above, the trunks and branches took on another color, which was brown.