Section 7 pages 79-89 question 5

"He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core or parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colours. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality." (89) what does this mean?