Question

What is the mood of this passage

The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up.No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering on that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return.Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet knows it must.

Answer 1

The mood of this passage is GLOOMY AND MELANCHOLY.

The prevailing emotion or mood found in the excerpt is gloomy/melancholy. This is clear when we pay attention to the author's approach to the main character and the overall setting: the character wakes up in impenetrable "blackness", there's no sound but the wind in the "blackened trees", he stood on a "cold autistic dark", and so on and so forth. All the setting is filled with darkness, there is nothing that evokes to something cheerful or enjoyable and the character is pensive in the middle of all that.