"The Dales rolled green and still and beautiful away to the east, and the quiet evening air was full of sunset and the sleepy twitter of birds. No other human was in sight." (Vault Of The Ages, New York, 1969, p. 51)
"...he sniffed the rich green life about him with a new delight. Summer, leaves rustling and breaking the light into golden flecks, a glimpse of blue sky amid cool shadows, a king snake sunning itself on a moss-grown log, a pheasant rising on alarmed wings before he could shoot, like a rainbowed lightning flash - oh, it was good to be alive, alive and free in the young summer!" (ibid., p. 55)
Secondly, there are reflections on the human condition:
"...not even the supernatural, demons and ghosts and the very gods, threatened men. The powers of night and storm, flood and fire and drought and winter, were still a looming terror, but they had been conquered once by the ancients and they could be harnessed again.
"No, man's remorseless and deadly foe was only - himself.
"But that enemy was old and strong and crafty." (ibid., p. 58)
In the past and in an imagined future, Anderson shows barbarians on the move. Tribes dispossessed, whether by Huns from the east or by the Lann from the north, tend to invade other territories, to the west or the south, but is this right? No, if social leaders are capable of any moral judgement, then a better course of action is to seek military allies and trading partners in the unconquered territories.
Lastly, the human condition goes much deeper:
"...what was this mysterious 'I' which reached back a few years and forward an unknown number of days? What was it that housed in his skull and looked out at the world, forever a prisoner within itself, and - and - Collie drew back from the thought with a shudder." (Twilight World, London, 1984, p. 95)
Collie is an active extrovert who would not tend to pursue that thought much further. But where fiction ends, psychology, philosophy, spirituality and meditation begin.
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