to confuse the matter even further , there seemed to be nothing which could prevent him from entertaining the likelihood that this nature of lightas with starlighttraveled great distances and that those rays reaching him now had , thus far , undertaken a centuries-long excursion , having been imparted from a heavenly body no longer occupying the place it once held out in the vast reaches : a memory long since burned away , or one which had burst rather suddenly , leaving now only fragments of what it had once been and an ever-fading specter in obsolete hyperextension , a phantom beacon which could only mislead him now to a state of waking .