"this hard mineral gravitational scene"

"As I am writing this story it will be evident that I survived, and I cannot hope to convey what the experience was like, how long it was, how terrible, how hopeless: a primal experience of a total loss of hope.  Falling, what the child fears, what the man dreads, is itself the image of death, of the defencelessness of the body, of its frailty and mortality, its absolute subjection to alien causes.  Even in a harmless fall in the road there is a little moment of horror when the faller realizes that he cannot help himself; he has been taken over by a relentless mechanism and must continue with it to the end and be subject to the consequences.  'There is nothing more I can do.'  How long, how infinitely expansible, a second is when it contains this thought, which is an effigy of death.  A complete fall into the void, something which I had often imagined on aeroplanes, is of course the most terrible thing of all.  Hands, feet, muscles, all the familiar protective mechanisms of the body are suddenly useless.  The enmity of matter is unleashed against the frail breakable crushable animal form, always perhaps an alien in this hard mineral gravitational scene."

-- Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea