37.

The earth was black and soft and speckled with pine needles, pinecones, the healthy forest floor. The evergreens towered up with fresh, earthy grandeur. Joshua was walking alongside a man who he seemed to suppose through strange intuition was Walt Whitman, except for the fact that the old, bearded man looked different from the pictures of Whitman Joshua had seen. His face was drawn down long, the chin jutting down to a point, the tip of the nose drooping down like an eagle's beak.

"The world," the old man was saying. "Where does this idea come from--that we live in a world, a cosmos? We can never experience what a world is--we get fragmented pieces of it. Our consciousness reaches into Japan and Ireland--all abstracted, gleaned, from the tiniest bits of evidence and news that come in daily experience. One need ask any empiricist a simple question to prove his error--Is there such a thing as 'the world'? He will reply that there is--for we cannot conceive that we do not exist within a whole, a totality. But neither he, nor any conscious being anywhere has ever seen this thing 'the world'--there is no one who has stood before all creation and seen it in a single grand vista. How do we know of its existence? And is there such a thing after all? Is there any perspective within which all this universe subsists as a single entity--or is it all bits and pieces, fragmented perspectives contradicting one another, shattered glimpses of something that on no level coheres into a Totality, a Cosmos? Ah, I enjoy thoughts like these. But they are just joy--simple joy. They do not mean anything but a little pleasure for an old man to take in his thoughts. I wish--I wish there were something, anything in this world with more significance than that. But then again, if there were, it would most likely be the terrible things that have significance, rather than the good things--world wars, mass murders, torture. So long as things like these are just as silly as some vulgar tale heard over beers, we have very little to fear in this world."

Joshua realized that tears were running down his own cheeks.

"Have my thoughts aggrieved you?" asked the old man.

But Joshua could not answer, and would not know the answer were he able to speak.