After a while I happened on a little farm. It had a wood frame house that was painted blue. The windows were done up in a neat white trim.
I knocked on the door, and an old couple invited me in. They had made the decision when they were young that they would read through the Great Destruction without being too concerned about whether they survived.
They cooked for me, though I protested.They offered me a place to sleep.
That night after dinner, they talked of what they learned.
What follows is what I remember of what they said:
“In the Days Before, the world lived in dread.There were more reasons for that than anyone could understand. Chief among them was the emptiness brought on by the lack of any sense of a meaningful life.”
“. . .A meaningful life is a life that sustains human beings well, with the outside structured in harmony with the inside. Instead, wealth and technology became substitutes for meaning."
“As the world changes, the forms of its relationships change also. Those who prefer the path of least resistance group themselves with others of like mind. Likewise, peo– ple with similar interests find themselves dependent on others who are like them. Obviously this still happens now, but its beginnings were in the Days Before.”
“Reality is structured in such a way that every level of understanding a human being can reach finds its counterpart in the external world, though that world may not always be physical in nature.”
“If one who loves is quiet enough, he or she can feel the sun radiating love into the leaves of the plants.”
“What we now know as the nothing is the fertile void on which all created reality rests. With the help of higher powers, human beings thought themselves into existence out of that void. This is why they return to it after death.”
“Beauty is infinite in its forms, each of which is rooted in silence.”
As they talked I realized I needed a change, that I was tired of wandering. I wanted to see something of what the world had made of itself, something to contrast with the world of silence they had helped to explain.
In the morning I thanked them and began my walk again. I had decided to head to the City of Sorrows. There, the old life still existed. There were cars and trains, tall buildings and subways. The people still held to the old understanding, having drawn a line between them and the ways of the countryside.