Lowry quotes from Conrad Aiken's 1928 short story 'A Man Alone At Lunch' from collection Costumes By Eros in Chapter 3 of Ultramarine during a long internal dialogue by Dana Hilliot as he muses about truth, beauty and good after his drunken drift through the red light district of Dairen; "there would come on one out of the nothing of nescience, this conscious knowledge of the one truth which would mean absolute power, absolute happiness." (Pg. 111). Compare to Aiken's:" To be a dead leaf, dashed out into space, among the constellations — beyond the Pole Star and the Bear, beyond the uttermost sun, into the freezing Nothing of Nescience. (Costumes By Eros Pg. 56)
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