The alchemist and his castle

and there he was, under the broadness of his own profession, sloped in his castle with his gloves and his glasses and the light and the instruments and their sounds and smells and things.

Drowning in his shelves of items and flasks and impliments, of crystall-dusts and shining objects and the glass and the metall that gleams dully and perfectly at the flame of magnesium, the parchment with his own ink in the letters and figures and diagrams in the cellar beneath the sky that he tries to understand with its stars that he journies and memorates within its own perfect rubber instances of powedery substance that boils fitfully into homogenous nothingness as he peers out of his window and notices, astounded, that it rains.