Our spirit lives will be changed by this ordeal, and as I sit here in this white, narrow room, it occurs to me that I should take this chance to tell you what he has meant up till now. This room is bright with what he has been to me. Now comes the passing of an era, for we must take a journey, and we will be changed by it, perhaps for the better. Let me tell you of the golden land, the city of Pan in the late afternoon sun. It stretches block on block and column on column out to the distant cypresses. He is himself a place, a civilization. That we, jointly, hand in hand, held that world, is our history. The persons we knew, great writers, great artists, great actors from distant planets, were his friends.
They were himself. His is a rare gift, that of knowing the other.
While we watched, hand in hand, protecting our world, many great persons died. Many lives that lit the eons before and after them acquiesced to the lateness of the afternoon.
When we begin again, we shall have to begin differently. In another world we will be more like others, less like spirits, perhaps a little more ourselves.
I can make that reach into a material world. It is harder for him. He is more genial than I, and more cursed. Little things bother him. I can get along on a material life.
He is the most understanding person I have ever met.
Not only because he is forgiving; he really understands, with what ordinary people call a
"sixth sense", what the other says. Being with him I wonder why every person isn't like him. It seems a necessary way of being. It has become very necessary to me.
The artists of the distant planets, when he talked to them, all cried in amazement, "You really understand!"
There is nothing I could say to him that he would not understand now, in any language.
Yet so many times we didn't talk, and we didn't understand. It is very hard to remember anyone thing about our time together on this bright planet. I try to tell you now because everything is about to change. We will be different from having gone through this terrible ordeal that is now occurring. Perhaps we will be better. But he will be a little more vulnerable, a little more nebulous, like the Milky Way, and I will be a little harder, like iron. It is not necessarily bad.
22
There is very little left to do here. There is just to love, in any language. To love what is left of two people who, hands joined, and from a distance, beheld the city of Pan, making with their joined hands a fortification around it, to preserve it. I tell you this now, for there are many journeys to take, and many tears to be shed, and the golden city may crumble to dust beneath our weeping, till we fly away to an ordinary planet, take on our material lives, and are free.