-3-
"He's in a note-taking mood.
He'll sit staring into space, and presto! make a note. His hand obeys
his brain. He's a marvel to watch. Then some more pressurized time
goes, and you betcha!--"
"Another note!"
"Wonder what it is. The brave
soul reckons, and the evil genius replies: another observation which,
still, does not reveal . . . "
"One note erases the last,
and we are left with . . . "
"Chairs askew, and the moon
rising unnoticed in the left-hand corner."
"Sponse and response."
"A sense of eternity."
"I say, thinking is diving
into intervals lately."
"And from my great unfinished
poem I quote:
In the disconsolate, air-conditioned
coffeeshop
The random person at my left
seems not harrassed--"
"Save it!"
"We are in a world nobody
has envisioned."
"I don't think we are even
in the world anymore. If there was a world. Could be . . . there never
was a world."
"It was provisional. Preparatory.
Mind-boggling! And now--"
"Well now my wit is sharpened
in isolation. My body is gone."
"Those parts of the landscape,
and the history, which were hypothetical remain . . . unfinished.
Because . . ."
"It really was up to us to
establish truth!"
"These are all viable statements.
Anybody else got one?"
"Everything is best with
cheese melted on it."
"That will do."
"Viable?"
"Most people that I ever
knew aren't in fact around anymore. When I think about it, damn it,
hardly anyone made it through life. If we tally it up where did they
go, Don Massell et. al.?"
"Don Massell? The name is
familiar."
"Only a few are on record
as dying, the rest seem to have snuck off. Maybe the world is just
a temporary stopping place, not even the main map."
"The main map! Jesus!"
"You know what Louis Pasteur
said right before he died: he said: "It's not the organism, it's the
terrain," Louis Pasteur said, right before he died.
"You mean maybe life is just
an outake, not the main movie?"
"The question about these
people who say things right before they die is: how do they manage
it?"
"Reynolds!"
"Someone must whisper: that's
what Poe said. Poe said . . ."
