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He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
Figure out where you’re going before you go there: it misses the whole point and yet there is always the chance that, little as it says, it says it.
He has broken through the barrier of fatigue and come into a calm flat world where nothing matters much.
Funny, the world just can’t touch you once you follow your instincts.
“Last night driving home I got this feeling of a straight road ahead of me; before that I was sort of in the bushes and it didn’t matter which way I went.”
But the pause stretches, inflates, as if, used for sixty years to space out words, it at last has taken on a cancerous life of its own and swallowed the words.
He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.
“It’s all right, Lucy. The truth shouldn’t be able to hurt us.” These words are a shadow of his idea that if faith is true, then nothing that is true is in conflict with faith.
Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here; why is this particular ordinary town for him the center and index of a universe that contains great prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of “any place,” prelude to the ultimate, “Why am I me?”—re-ignites panic in his heart.
