First, a passage to set the tone (one that should be familiar):

Second, a summary of my position and purpose: The novels of Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore glimpse and occasionally enact a disquieting—what I have come to call a cosmic—indifference to human lives, cultures, languages, pleasures, pains, values, and concerns. This indifference, this non-attitude of nothingness, is not mitigated, neither overcome nor counter-acted. It, and the “ruthless fate” it implies, lingers in the background of their writings: an elegant, sublime, threatening, and seductive point of view that is unmoved by violence, death, and cruelty. Far from brightening this disconcerting background, my conclusion suggests that our novelists learn something by imagining their way into this void, using it as a critical optic for glancing at what they, what we, what “one cannot not want” (Spivak 47). It keeps coming back to me, this clause: “There is a sadness at the back of life.…” It points, quite directly I think, at the nothing against which we fortunate creatures have collectively erected all kinds of vague, alluring, evolving, and self-important consolations. This sadness is sad insofar as it saddens us. In itself, it is quite ruthless (because intentionless, literally mindless), a shadowy, cosmic agitation of nonconscious tremors and gleams.

The clause (I repeat) keeps coming back to me, and I am not sure why.