Page Content (OCR)
fervent zest. But what silly thoughts! Why should he be thinking such immature things? He would stay in Twentynine Palms a few more days, and that was all. Then he could go to Dora. Yes, Dora. Would she look like the woman he had just dreamed about? Then there was another. Yes, she called herself Launie. —But that was Or was it? Adam kept trying to probe within his mind. All through the long Sunday he reflected, until the day was ended by the setting golden sun, which had set the same way for millions of years. When the stars appeared and it was fully night, Adam felt strange in town. The town merely went about its usual ways, but they were now entirely strange and foreign to him. These were the slow, step-by-step ways of evolution, and Adam felt himself thousands of years ahead of that pace. It would take the whole world, of which Twenty-nine Palms was such a small part, many years to unfold into the knowledge and awareness he now felt. He did not belong here. He belonged back in the comforting solitude of his cabin. A lone car made its way on the desert road to an isolated cabin. It carried its driver from the life of the town to the loneliness that only the desert can bestow. A loneliness it is, so absolute there is only one way beyond it, and that is the road back to life. As Paul once said, to be reborn there must first be a separation. Adam was separating himself from all earthly things he knew, but he was hitching his wagon to a star, the star of ultimate finality in the physical world. Though it had been hid behind the earth, the star was his very own, his life. It was his beginning, and it was his end. The star was his own sun. He stepped out of the cabin and looked up at the canopy of stars which were but radiant suns, by the billions, and by the billions, planets revolved around them to be nourished by their heat, light, and sustenance. Earth was no more and no 185 THE EASE OF FORGETTING Yes, he thought, that is settled. He would go into the sun, with all just a dream.