AND time,’ said Bernard, ‘lets fall its drop. The drop that has formed on the roof of the soul falls. On the roof of my mind time, forming, lets fall its drop. Last week, as I stood shaving, the drop fell. I, standing with my razor in my hand, became suddenly aware of the merely habitual nature of my action (this is the drop forming) and congratulated my hands, ironically, for keeping at it. Shave, shave, shave, I said. Go on shaving. The drop fell. All through the day’s work, at intervals, my mind went to an empty place, saying, “What is lost? What is over?” And “Over and done with,” I muttered, “over and done with”, solacing myself with words. People noticed the vacuity of my face and the aimlessness of my conversation. The last words of my sentence tailed away. And as I buttoned on my coat to go home I said more dramatically, “I have lost my youth”. ‘It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue—the penalty of living in an old civilization with a notebook. This drop falling has nothing to do with losing my youth. This drop falling is time tapering to a point. Time, which is a sunny pasture covered with a dancing light, time, which is widespread as a field at midday, becomes pendent. Time tapers to a point. As a drop falls from a glass heavy with some sediment, time falls. These are the true cycles, these are the true events.

The wind was now licking her with force. Pale and fragile, breathing gently, she could feel it salty and playful, pervading and penetrating her entire body, reviving her. She half opened her eyes. Down there below, the sea shone in waves of copper, stretched out, deep, opaque, serene. It came dense and rebellious, rising in spirals. Then it extended itself ... spreading itself over the peaceful sands like a living body. The sea — she said in a whisper, her voice hoarse.

"Lydgate, certain that his patient wished to be alone, soon left him; and the black figure with hands behind and head bent forward continued to pace the walk where the dark yew-trees gave him a mute companionship in melancholy, and the little shadows of bird or leaf that fleeted accross the isles of sunlight, stole along in silence as in the presence of a sorrow. Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death--who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is different from what we call knowing it, as the visions of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious visions of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace 'we all must die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness, 'I must die--and soon,' then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moments of dim earthly discerning may be like the first" (Eliot 397-398).

As for the White House, all the boy’s family had lived there, and, barring the eight years of Andrew Jackson’s reign, had been more or less at home there ever since it was built. The boy half thought he owned it, and took it for granted that he should some day live in it. He felt no sensation whatever before Presidents. A President was a matter of course in every respectable family; he had two in his own; three, if he counted old Nathaniel Gorham, who was the oldest and first in distinction. Revolutionary patriots, or perhaps a Colonial Governor, might be worth talking about, but any one could be President, and some very shady characters were likely to be.

“For people of my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist, the villages where they went on holiday, the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafés and houses of their past. And if their outer form has been preserved, it’s all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside it anymore. I have nowhere to return to. It’s like a state of imprisonment. The walls of the cell are the horizon of what I can see. Beyond them exists a world that’s alien to me and doesn’t belong to me. So for people like me the only thing possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a mirage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air. That’s what was going through my mind as we sat there in silence. It was better than a conversation. I have no idea what either of the men was thinking about. Perhaps about the same thing.”

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life has he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.

Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

He once thought it himself, that he might die with grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

“I stopped in the sloping market square, and gradually I felt flooded by a powerful sense of communion with the people passing by. Each man was my brother and each woman my sister. We were so very much alike. So fragile, impermanent, and easily destroyed. We trustingly went to and fro beneath the sky, which had nothing good in store for us. Spring is just a short interlude, after which the mighty armies of death advance; they’re already besieging the city walls. We live in a state of siege. If one takes a close look at each fragment of a moment, one might choke with terror. Within our bodies disintegration inexorably advances; soon we shall fall sick and die. Our loved ones will leave us, the memory of them will dissolve in the tumult; nothing will remain. Just a few clothes in the wardrobe and someone in a photograph, no longer recognized. The most precious memories will dissipate. Everything will sink into darkness and vanish. I noticed a pregnant girl sitting on a bench, reading a newspaper, and suddenly it occurred to me what a blessing it is to be ignorant. How could one possibly know all this and not miscarry?”

He did close his eyes. He closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother’s face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country. He lay half headless on the bed with his arms outflung, most of his right hand missing. Chigurh rose and picked up the empty casing off the rug and blew into it and put it in his pocket and looked at his watch. The new day was still a minute away.

I’d think you would be hard pressed to find a more stunning passage about someone being shot in the face with a shotgun

The sun had risen to its full height. It was no longer half seen and guessed at, from hints and gleams, as if a girl couched on her green-sea mattress tired her brows with water-globed jewels that sent lances of opal-tinted light falling and flashing in the uncertain air like the flanks of a dolphin leaping, or the flash of a falling blade. Now the sun burnt uncompromising, undeniable. It struck upon the hard sand, and the rocks became furnaces of red heat; it searched each pool and caught the minnow hiding in the cranny, and showed the rusty cartwheel, the white bone, or the boot without laces stuck, black as iron, in the sand. It gave to everything its exact measure of colour; to the sandhills their innumerable glitter, to the wild grasses their glancing green; or it fell upon the arid waste of the desert, here wind-scourged into furrows, here swept into desolate cairns, here sprinkled with stunted dark-green jungle trees. It lit up the smooth gilt mosque, the frail pink-and-white card houses of the southern village, and the long-breasted, white-haired women who knelt in the river bed beating wrinkled cloths upon stones. Steamers thudding slowly over the sea were caught in the level stare of the sun, and it beat through the yellow awnings upon passengers who dozed or paced the deck, shading their eyes to look for the land, while day after day, compressed in its oily throbbing sides, the ship bore them on monotonously over the waters.

It had stopped snowing. The overcast broke here and there; leadengray clouds parted to reveal glimpses of the sun, whose rays lend a bluish hue to the landscape. Then the sky turned clear. A bright, pure frost reigned, winter’s splendor settled over mid-November, and the panorama beyond the arches of the balcony was magnificent — snow-powdered forests, ravines filled with soft white, a glistening sunlit valley under a radiant blue sky. And of an evening, when the almost circular moon appeared, the world turned magical and wonderful — flickering crystals and glittering diamonds flung far and wide. The forests stood out black against white. The regions of the sky beyond reach of moonlight were dark and embroidered with stars. The sharp, precise, intense shadows of houses, trees, and telegraph poles cast on the sparkling surface looked more real and significant than the objects themselves. Within a few hours after sunset, the temperature sank to twenty degrees, then seventeen degrees. Its natural squalor hidden, the world seemed to be under a spell of icy purity, trapped inside a fantastic dream of fatal enchantment.

** My god, the places this eloquent description takes you. What an adventure. What beauty in this world!

I study German as well, so here is the original prose in German: “Es hatte zu schneien aufgehört. Teilweise öffnete der Himmel sich; graublaue Wolken, die sich geschieden, ließen Sonnenblicke einfallen, die die Landschaft bläulich färbten. Dann wurde es völlig heiter. Klarer Frost herrschte, reine, gesicherte Winterspracht um Mitte November, und das Panorama hinter den Bogen der Balkonloge, die bepuderten Wälder, die weichgefüllten Schlüfte, das weiße, sonnige Tal unter dem blaustrahlenden Himmel war herrlich. Abends gar, wenn der fast gerundete Mond erschien, verzauberte sich die Welt und ward wunderbar. Kristallisches Geflimmer, diamantnes Glitzern herrschte weit und breit. Sehr weiß und schwarz standen die Wälder. Die dem Monde fernen Himmelsgegenden lagen dunkel, mit Sternen bestickt. Scharfe, genaue und intensive Schatten, die wirklicher und bedeutender schienen als die Dinge selbst, fielen von den Häusern, den Bäumen, den Telegraphenstangen auf die blitzende Fläche. Es hatte sieben oder acht Grad Frost ein paar Stunden nach Sonnenuntergang. In eisige Reinheit schien die Welt gebannt, ihre natürliche Unsauberkeit zugedeckt und erstarrt im Traum eines phantastischen Todeszaubers.”

A man goes away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees. He walks in the street and there are the faces in front of his eyes, but there are no names for the faces. The voices he hears are not the voices he carried away in his ears a long time back when he went away. The voices he hears are loud. They are so loud he does not hear for a long time at a stretch those voices he carried away in his ears. But there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say, and they say: Come back. They say: Come back, boy. So he comes back.”

***

I’d be lying there in the hole in the middle of my bed where the spring had given down with the weight of wayfaring humanity, lying there on my back with my clothes on and looking up at the ceiling and watching the cigarette smoke flow up slow and splash against the ceiling like the upside-down slow-motion moving picture of the ghost of a waterfall or like the pale uncertain spirit rising up out of your mouth on the last exhalation, the way the Egyptians figured it, to leave the horizontal tenement of clay in its ill-fitting pants and vest. I’d be lying there letting the smoke drift up out of my mouth and not feeling anything, just watching the smoke as though I didn’t have any past or future.

A city uninhabited is different. Different from what a “normal” observer, straggling in the dark—the occasional dark—would see. It is a universal sin among the false-animate or unimaginative to refuse to let well enough alone. Their compulsion to gather together, their pathological fear of loneliness extends on past the threshold of sleep; so that when they turn the corner, as we all must, as we all have done and do—some more often than others—to find ourselves on the street . . . You know the street I mean, child. The street of the Twentieth Century, at whose far end or turning—we hope—is some sense of home or safety. But no guarantees. A street we are put at the wrong end of, for reasons best known to the agents who put us there. If there are agents. But a street we must walk.

She was the most self-effacing woman, self-effacing like all these women rescued from the worst poverty by the men who married them, always the daughters of roadmenders and woodcutters, sawmill workers or dirt farmers, taciturn women always absorbed in caring for their own families in a daily round of always the same chores, bed-making, cooking, farmyard chores and so on, women who never argued and whose matter-of-course attachment to their husbands and children was such as has already become unimaginable in a major part of our world today, but here along the Aurach we still had the same conditions and therefore the same relationships and therefore the same circumstances as existed two hundred or four hundred years ago, nature hadn't changed and so the people in their natural setting were still the same, with all their malevolence and frightful fecundity, we have here a breed of men, I thought, actually the same breed we had at the dawn of history, progress has passed them by, they're bone ignorant, with only a dim intuitive sense of everything which keeps them bound in trust to nature, a bond that, dangerous and painful as it may be, nevertheless guarantees their survival, and to which they have totally surrendered themselves, like their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, because they never had an alternative, once born they had to cope with their native situation, circumstances, conditions, which are already unimaginable to the modern mind, and they did cope; if ever they bucked against it, if ever the discrepancy between their world and today's world flashed on their minds, it was only for the briefest moment, after which they submitted again to the rules that have remained the same `as they were half a millennium ago, and whatever they found incomprehensible when they thought about it, the Church made comprehensible to them, as it does wherever it is still influential. This woman had always been reserve personified, never a loud word, never the first to speak, everything in and about her was oriented toward taking care of things around her, she took care of her children, her husband, and her and her husband's and her children's house and the garden and the riverbank and everything under her care was always in order and, depending on the season, always kept in yellow or blue or red or white colors by her special love for flowers and plants, probably always her secret and surest refuge.

This free air, this wind that strikes me in the soul of the face leaving it troubled in an imitation of an anguished ever-new ecstasy, anew and always, every time the plunge into a bottomless thing into which I fall always ceaselessly falling until I die and achieve at last silence.

“In dreams (Coleridge writes), images take the shape of the effects we believe they cause. We are not terrified because some sphinx is threatening us but rather dream of a sphinx in order to explain the terror we are feeling.”

There's a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It's a tranquility born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama.

I had told [my husband] a late-night walk alone relaxed me, allowed me to sleep when the stress or boredom of my job became too much. But in truth I didn't walk except the distance to an empty lot overgrown with grass. The empty lot appealed to me because it wasn't empty. Two species of snail called it home and three species of lizard, along with butterflies and dragonflies. From lowly origins - a muddy rut from truck tires - a puddle had over time collected rainwater to become a pond. Fish eggs had found their way to that place, and minnows and tadpoles could be seen there, and aquatic insects. Weeds had grown up around it, making the soil less likely to erode into the water. Songbirds on migration used it as a refueling station.

As habitats went, the lot wasn't complex, but its proximity dulled the impulse in my to just get in the car and start driving for the nearest wild place. I liked to visit late at night because I might see a wary fox passing through or catch a sugar glider resting on a telephone pole. Nighthawks gathered nearby to feast off the insects bombarding the streetlamps. Mice and owls played out ancient rituals of predator and prey. They all had a watchfulness about them that was different from animals in true wilderness; this was a jaded watchfulness, the result of a long and weary history. Tales of bad-faith encounters in human-occupied territory, tragic past events.

I didn't tell my husband my walk had a destination because I wanted to keep the lot for myself. There are so many things couples do from habit and because they are expected to, and I didn't mind those rituals. Sometimes I even enjoyed them. But I needed to be selfish about that patch of urban wilderness. It expanded in my mind while I was at work, calmed me, gave me a series of miniature dramas to look forward to. I didn't know that while I was applying this Band-Aid to my need to be unconfined, my husband was dreaming of Area X and much greater open spaces. But, later, the parallel helped assuage my anger at his leaving, and then my confusion when he came back in such a changed form... even if the stark truth is that I still did not truly understand what I had missed about him.

 At dawn the band of black clouds that slipped into town under cover of darkness can be seen loitering on the horizon like unemployed ghosts, impatient already for the day to be over so they can get to their Halloween pranks. The lightning from the night before now hangs upside down in the firs up in the mountains, waiting out the day in electric slumber, like a recharging bat. And a scavenger wind, ribbed and mangy, runs the frosted fields, whimpering with hunger, cold and stiff and terribly lonesome for its buddy the bat overhead there, snoring sparks in the tree limbs . . . in that kind of world. Runs and whimpers and clicks its frost teeth.

“In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”

Assembled there were the moon and a feverish wind, the incited, naked flesh of a man and a woman, sweat, perfume, the scars of a life at sea, the dim memory of ports around the world, a cramped, breathless peephole, a young boy's iron heart – but these cards from a gypsy deck were scattered, prophesying nothing. The universal order at last achieved, thanks to the sudden, screaming horn, had revealed an ineluctable circle of life – the cards had paired: Noboru and mother – mother and man – man and sea – sea and Noboru...

He was choked, wet, ecstatic. Certain he had watched a tangle of thread unravel to trace a hallowed figure. And it would have to be protected: for all he knew, he was its thirteen-year-old creator.

The Green Fly Inn burned on December twenty-first of 1936 and a good crowd gathered in spite of the cold and the late hour. Cabe made off with the cashbox and at the last minute authorized the fleeing patrons to carry what stock they could with them, so that with the warmth of the fire and the bottles and jars passing around, the affair took on a holiday aspect. Within minutes the back wall of the building fell completely away, spiraling off with a great rushing sound into the hollow. The rooftree collapsed then and the tin folded inward, the edges curling up away from the walls like foil.

By now the entire building was swallowed in flames rocketing up into the night with locomotive sounds and sucking on the screaming updraft half-burned boards with tremendous velocity which fell spinning, tracing red ribbons brilliantly down the night to crash into the canyon or upon the road, dividing the onlookers into two bands, grouped north and south out of harm’s way, their faces lacquered orange as jackolanterns in the ring of heat.

Until the stilts gave and the facing slid backward from the road with a hiss, yawed in a slow curvet about the anchor of the pine trunk, overrode the crumpling poles, vaulting on them far out over the canyon before the floor buckled and the whole structure, roof, walls, folded neatly about some unguessed axis and dropped vertically into the pit.

There it continued to burn, generating such heat that the hoard of glass beneath it ran molten and fused in a single sheet, shaped in ripples and flutings, encysted with crisp and blackened rubble, murrhined with bottlecaps. It is there yet, the last remnant of that landmark, flowing down the sharp fold of the valley like some imponderable archeological phenomenon.

'Nobody's lookin'.' He held her fast round the waist, and was cast into sad reflection by staring at the water below, a rippleless surface where minnows swam gracefully in calm transparent silence. White and blue sky made islands on it, so that the descent onto its hollows seemed deep and fathomless, and fishes swam over enormous gulfs and chasms of cobalt blue. Arthur's eyes were fixed into the beautiful earth-bowl of the depthless water, trying to explore each pool and shallow until, as well as an external silence there was a silence within himself that no particle of his mind or body wanted to break. Their faces could not be seen in the water, but were united with the shadows of the fish that flitted among upright reeds and spreading lilies, drawn to water as if they belonged there, as if the fang-like claws of the world would come unstuck from their flesh if they descended into its imaginary depths, as if they had known it before as a refuge and wanted to return to it, their ghosts already there, treading the calm unfurrowed depths and beckoning them to follow.

But there was no question of following. You were dragged down sooner or later whether you liked it or not. A ripple appeared in the middle of the water, expanded in concentric rings, and burst by a timeless force of power. Each line vanished into the reed-grass near the bank.

'I feel tired,' she said, breaking the silence.

'Come on, Doreen.' He took her arm and led her on to a footpath. They followed his short cut towards home, and came to the loneliest place of the afternoon where, drawn by a deathly and irresistible passion, they lay down together in the bottom of a hedge.

‘Yes, between your shoulders, over your heads, to a landscape,’ said Rhoda, ‘to a hollow where the many-backed steep hills come down like birds’ wings folded. There, on the short, firm turf, are bushes, dark leaved, and against their darkness I see a shape, white, but not of stone, moving, perhaps alive. But it is not you, it is not you, it is not you; not Percival, Susan, Jinny, Neville or Louis. When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright—a column; now a fountain, falling. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams. And for a second even now, even here, I reach my object and say, “Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe. Here is the end.”

They ain’t real, I thought as I walked down the hall, nary one. But I knew they were. You come into a strange place, into a town like Mason City, and they don’t seem real, but you know they are. You know they went wading in the creek when they were kids, and when they were bigger they used to go out about sunset and lean on the back fence and look across the country at the sky and not know what was happening inside them or whether they were happy or sad, and when they got grown they slept with their wives and tickled their babies to make them laugh and went to work in the morning and didn’t know what they wanted but had their reasons for doing the things they did, and then when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of the harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten what the reasons were. And then they will lie in bed some morning just before day and look up at the ceiling they can scarcely see because the lamp is shaded with a pinned-on newspaper and they don’t recognize the faces around the bed any more because the room is full of smoke, or fog, and it makes their eyes burn and gests in the throat. Oh, they are real, all right, and it may be the reason they don’t seem real to you is that you aren’t very real yourself.

For weeks she lay unmoving in a metal-framed bed in a bright room at the corner of the hospital wing that looked out on a cindered pathway and a row of cherry trees. I sat with her through long hours of wakeful dreaming; it was almost restful there. The sunlight threw complicated shapes across the bed that would spend the afternoon inching their way slowly along the blanket and on to the floor like things making an elaborately stealthy getaway. Hospital sounds came to me, soothingly muffled. My mother’s hands rested on the sheet, unmoving, pale as paper, impossibly large. She looked like a more than life-sized statue of herself. Some error had been made, some bit of celestial business had gone awry and she had been left like this, felled by death yet still alive, stranded between two imperceptibly darkening shores. When I was leaving at the end of the day’s vigil I would lean over her, teetering a little, and kiss her self-consciously on the forehead, smelling her mingled smell of soap and washed-out cotton and dried skin and musty hair.

Presently she died. It was, as they say in these parts, a great release.

It is late, the light is going. My mind aches from so much futile remembering. What does it signify, this chapter of family accidents? What is it I hope to retrieve? What is it I am trying to avoid? I see what was my life adrift behind me, going smaller and smaller with distance, like a city on an ice floe caught in a current, its twinkling lights, its palaces and spires and slums, all miraculously intact, all hopelessly beyond reach. Was it I who took an axe to the ice? What can I do now but stand on this crumbling promontory and watch the past as it dwindles? When I look ahead, I see nothing except empty morning, and no day, only dusk thickening into night, and, far off, something that is not to be made out, something vague, patient, biding. Is that the future, trying to speak to me here, among these shadows of the past? I do not want to hear what it might have to say.

For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound, the baby shoes dipped in bronze, the taint in the blood stream. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us.

That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.

At every hour of the day, in one country or another, a man looks up from peering at plants with names such as ironweed or wolfberry. The man is the only person inside the circle of the horizon. He stares across the veldt or the steppes or the pampas and prepares to think of himself as quite alone. But he cannot think of himself and the grass around his knees and the clouds over his head and nothing more. He thinks of himself talking or writing to a young woman. He thinks of himself telling the young woman that he thinks of her whenever he finds himself alone in grasslands. He thinks of himself telling the young woman that he thinks of her telling him she thinks of a man such as himself whenever she sits at her desk and thinks of the grasslands of the world.

[W]hat should develop for Pirate here but a sumptuous Oriental episode: vaulting lazily and well over the fence and sneaking in to town, to the Forbidden Quarter. There to stumble into an orgy held by a Messiah no one has quite recognized yet, and to know, as your eyes meet, that you are his John the Baptist, his Nathan of Gaza, that it is you who must convince him of his Godhead, proclaim him to others, love him both profanely and in the Name of what he is . .. it could be no one's fantasy but H. A. Loaf's.

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