In the desert there is all—and yet nothing…. God is there and man is not.

Balzac’s line frames the desert as a paradoxical space: materially empty yet spiritually and imaginatively full. “All—and yet nothing” suggests that when human society, commerce, and distraction fall away, what remains is the bare totality of existence—silence, vastness, and the mind’s confrontation with the absolute. The second sentence sharpens the contrast: the desert is figured as a realm where the human presence (as social creature, builder, talker) disappears, and the divine or transcendent becomes more palpable. The quote thus participates in a Romantic-era tendency to treat extreme landscapes as moral and metaphysical laboratories, where solitude strips perception down to essentials.