these new circumstances brought with them , aloft in the muggy air , the pervading monition that an individual , immersed as he may be in the thrill of a new persona , must avoid becoming too consumed with this role , lest the role should , itself , succeed in consuming him ; mindful of such dangers , he paused briefly from his duties to catch his breath only to discover a procession of men trekking over a distant hilltop , carving into the elaborate stone pillars that lined it the edicts of a young and ambitious king whounbeknownst to the localshad long since laid claim to this land , declared as his subjects its peoples , and decreed , for the prosperity and tranquility of both , a series of severe religious and civil codes which , on transgression , bore devastating and horrific consequences ; adrift in his secret jealousies and mad yearnings , the sickened and hungry peasant fancied for himself a nature of kingly form , markedly different from that of the enviable totalitarian upon whom he spied : he constructed for himself from the substance of dream his own kingdom where he , too , could be the young and ambitious kingmuch younger , naturally , than he had been external to this whimsy and more ambitious than the implements at his disposal would allow him to be , for in the depths of his imagination , he could be afforded the luxury of forgetting his age and the fortitude to disentangle from the limitations imposed on him by this simple , passionless existence his unextinguished vigor , until he unleashed from within himself the capacity to reduce to dust and innocuous vibration all which had heretofore comprised his immediate circumstances , leaving in the lurch the diminishing residuum of that lurking phantom called time ; as this youthful , but unlikely sovereign , he ruled with utter malice and unquestionable self-interestas all autocrats shouldover a country made up not of men , nor of any other nature of hominian beast , but rather of blades of grass ; and as an embodiment of the grasses shared hopes and aspirations , his ascendancy to the throne was followed almost immediately by another inexplicable transformation , wherein he found himself assuming the shape of the grass itself , albeit , not in the form of a single , solitary blade , but as the whole of which all solitary blades must invariably become parts ; extended further in his fancy , he spread himself beyond the horizons to take on more topographical forms : those of pastures rolling into grass-stalked hills and smoothly-contoured valleys , oscillating upwards and then downwards , convexly then concavely , before descending finally to plainspunctuated by wild grasses , tangles of weeds , roots , and cohabitating mossesall of whom he forged together into a singular soul , a distinct and consolidated group consciousness which rippled passively in the traversing breeze ; if this was not enough , the idling and imaginative peasant was visited quite suddenly by the prospect of consociating with this amalgamated group awareness a realm with which he maintained a greater familiarity : the realm of man ; henceforth , he became the binding force of all social groups , the avatar of that shared pride and sense of belonging that formed the basis of all patriotism ; he became the collective search for meaning in the arts , the sciences , the humanities , and abidingly , in religion ; then he evolved once more : this time into an unquenchable sense of dread , a nagging lack of assurance brought on by those daunting remainders which purported themselves negligible in the face of their accompanying solutions , as though expecting one to ignore blatantly the ensuant implication that no answer could truly be whole ; he , thereupon , assumed the aspect of mathematical determinism , which compelled him rigidly and fastidiouslyas though overwrought by a newfound strain of numeric cynicismto seek to reduce all known quantities to nihility ; accordingly he came to languish in a fresh despair and he descended like a twirling , swaying feather back to the safer and more comfortable sphere of anti-intellectual curiosity , as he wiped sweat from his brow and proceeded once more to till the fields .