Simon’s sole regret was his failure to have penetrated the slumberer’s dream (for she was dreaming) and dreams, with his growing disengagement from worldly concerns, intrigued him no end. It had something to do with their defiance of Reality’s arbitrary precepts, as if Reality, by itself, had fallen far too short of Simon's expectations; existence held much more, he was convinced, and the last two years had brought him ever closer to substantiating this claim. There were obstacles, however. Language was one of them. Words seemed ill-equipped to define the levels he sometimes glimpsed. His vow of silence had been made (in part) to avoid the pitfalls of rhetoric, the constant substitution of symbols for things. Yet, as sensitive as he had become to nonverbal stimuli, silence, likewise, had served to deepen Simon’s sense of alienation. Already an outsider, the role he was falling into failed to qualify as a role at all; instead it led him further into a realm of incommunicative seclusion. And this, in turn (as his recent encounter brought home poignantly) walled him in with himself, stone by stone by isolating stone. The heat was borderline-inhospitable. He checked the westerly clouds; they were still mulling it over. He opened his shirt then shifted his backpack to admit some circulating air. The desert's extremes in temperature, night to day, were jolting… and this afternoon’s dose of sunburn, no doubt, would amplify late-evening chills. He shook his canteen. Its doleful slosh of four or five gulps was hardly reassuring. Food provisions, too, were rather sparse: one crushed box of raisins and a thin-skinned tangerine. But survival was somehow not at issue; tramping along the empty road, less pragmatic thoughts monopolized Simon’s mind. * * |
