Bly is describing something that does not announce itself as a gift. The man who has been elevated — by talent, by luck, by the pneumatic conviction that ascending is the point — discovers that the floor was always there, and that reaching it is not failure but arrival at a different kind of ground. Notice that he calls it lowliness, not humility; the word matters because humility can still carry spiritual ambition inside it, a pride in having bent the knee correctly. Lowliness is less convertible. It just sits there, heavy and damp, next to the cracked pavement.

What the passage does not say is that this descent produces wisdom, or that the depression resolves into something higher. It says a mean life begins. Ordinariness, weightiness, silences — these are not stations on the way to somewhere else. The logic that says *if I endure this long enough I will break through to the other side* is still the same logic that built the elevation in the first place. What Bly is pointing at is the soul's actual weather: not the ascent, not the breakthrough, but the weight of a life that is no longer pretending to be more buoyant than it is. Water prefers low places not because low places are better, but because water does not argue with gravity.