18.

Once, when Joshua was only a little boy, he'd looked out across his small plot of front yard in the Queens house where he grew up, and somehow it seemed he had not expected to see what was the only thing he could see and the only thing possible to see there. It was nothing unusual--just the bustle of people moving down the gray-white sidewalk, the cars upon the blacktop street, the grass a little yellowed from lack of water, the storefronts and billboards and the hard stony character of the passersby. But somehow he'd not expected to see this, somehow he'd expected to see some miracle, some mystery, something that spoke to his future greatness, something magical that would take away the tedium of what it was to be normal and usual. He had no idea what this magical thing was--he only felt that, yes, one day he would see magic, he'd have a magical life and a magical destiny, and the only thing this required was that he'd see something impossible for him to see, a circular square perhaps.

But then, then when he was fifteen years old, he was amazed at that very selfsame sight--the selfsame yard that was still tinged with yellow, the passersby moving with quick determined motions, the shopkeepers and the stands of fruit, the cars cutting their corners and straight lines down the road. This very thing was the magical in the world--this very sight was a sight of the impossible--this world would be thought the darkest witchcraft and most bizarre magic and miracle to a man born a thousand years ago. What was this place? What could it mean, and how on earth did it exist? . . . it was so patently absurd that any of this should be. And so the scientist and astronomer try to take the magic away from us with their explanations and theories, try to explain how this came to be, saying, "There is a rational explanation; there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this." But if one wants magic, if the young man wants to experience the mysticism and oneness with God, if there is anywhere some man who wishes to dabble in black magic and shamanism, if there are any that wish to believe in ghosts and monsters and angels, not to be explained away by some scientist's or doctor's scribbled words on paper--then just look out your window, thought Joshua; just look out at the street, or across some landscape, some gully, desert or suburb. You shall not be disappointed.

And the men moved about him, the women moved about him, exchanging a magazine for a sandwich, exchanging a haircut for gasoline with which to drive, exchanging a movie rental for nail clippers or eyeglasses, all of it the grandest system. Should every one of these multitudes suddenly put down their ceaseless activity of working and buying all at once, even for a single day, the whole system of it would collapse, and they would find it impossible to purchase even a newspaper. And yet it went on and on as it had been going on for centuries, Currency being the lifeblood of the entire organism; and a thought suddenly made Joshua shudder, though he knew not what the thought meant, nor in what words it could be expressed. The city seemed to him a vast tautology like a dictionary wherein each word is defined elsewhere with the selfsame words that were defined again somewhere else. And yet the tautology of exchange--bread being traded for clothes that were traded for books that were traded for bread--yet it abounded with overflow, all of it canceling itself out and equaling zero; and still, all of it equaling the wealth of a hundred trillion at once. And he hoped briefly that he should one day experience madness; for madness is a passion beyond all passions, and a rational illumination so bright that it blinds one's reason.