We ride down out of the pass onto a small green plain. To the immediate south we can see pine-forested mountains that still have last winter's snow on the peaks. In all other directions appear lower mountains, more in the distance, but just as clear and sharp. This picture-postcard scenery vaguely fits memory but not definitely. This interstate freeway we are on must not have existed then.

The statement "To travel is better than to arrive" comes back to mind again and stays. We have been traveling and now we will arrive. For me a period of depression comes on when I reach a temporary goal like this and have to reorient myself toward another one. In a day or two John and Sylvia must go back and Chris and I must decide what we want to do next. Everything has to be reorganized.

The main street of the town seems vaguely familiar but there's a feeling of being a tourist now and I see the shop signs are for me, the tourist, and not for people who live here. This isn't really a small town. People are moving too fast and too independently of one another. It's one of these population fifteen-to-thirty-thousand towns that isn't exactly a town, not exactly a city...not exactly anything really.

We eat lunch in a glass-and-chrome restaurant that brings no recall at all. It looks as though it's been built since he lived here and shows the same lack of self-identity seen on the main street.

I go to a phone book and look for Robert DeWeese's number but don't find it. I dial the operator but she's never heard of the party and can't tell me the number. I don't believe it! Were they just in his imagination? Her statement produces a panicky feeling that lasts for a moment, but then I remember their answer to my letter telling them we were coming and calm down. Imaginary people don't use the mails.

John suggests I try to call the art department or some friends. I smoke for a while and drink coffee, and when I'm relaxed again I do this and learn how to get there. It's not the technology that's scary. It's what it does to the relations between people, like callers and operators, that's scary.

From the town to the mountains across the valley floor must be less than ten miles, and we cross that distance now on dirt roads through rich green high alfalfa ready for cutting, so thick it looks difficult to walk through. The fields sweep outward and slightly upward to the base of the mountains where a much darker green of the pines rises suddenly up. That will be where the DeWeeses live. Where the light green and the dark green meet. The wind is full of the lightgreen new-

mown-hay smells and livestock smells. At one point we pass through a cold bank of air where the smell changes to pine, but then are back in the warmth again. Sunlight and meadows and the close-looming mountain.

Just as we get to the pines, the gravel in the road becomes very deep. We slow down to first gear and ten miles an hour and I keep both feet off the pegs to kick the cycle upright again if it should mush into the gravel and start to go down. We round a corner and suddenly enter the pines and a very steep V canyon in the mountain, and there right beside the road is a large grey house with an enormous abstract iron sculpture attached to one side and beneath it sitting in a chair tipped back against the house surrounded by company is the living image of DeWeese himself with a can of beer in his hand, which waves to us. Right out of the old photographs.

I'm so busy keeping the machine up I can't take my hands off the grips and I wave a leg back instead. The living image of DeWeese himself grins as we pull up.

"You found it," he says. Relaxed smile. Happy eyes.

"It's been a long time," I say. I feel happy too, though strange at suddenly seeing the image move and talk.

We dismount and take off our riding gear and I see that the open porch deck he and his guests are on is unfinished and unweathered. DeWeese looks down from where it is only a few feet above the road on our side, but the V of the canyon slants so steeply that on the far side the ground descends fifteen feet below the deck. The stream itself appears another fifty feet down and away from the house, among trees and deep grass where a horse, partially hidden by the trees, grazes without looking up. Now we have to look high to see the sky. Surrounding us is the dark-green forest we watched as we approached.

"This is just beautiful!" Sylvia says.

The living image of DeWeese smiles down at her. "Thank you," he says, "I'm glad you like it." His tone is all here and now, completely relaxed. I realize that although this is the authentic image of DeWeese himself, it's also a brand-new person who's been renewing himself continually and I'm going to have to get to know him all over again.

We step up onto the deck. Between the floorboards it has spaces, like a grate. I can see the ground through them. With a "Well, I'm not quite sure how to do this" tone and smile, DeWeese makes introductions all around, but they're in one ear and out the other. I can never remember names. His guests are an art instructor from the school who has horn-rimmed glasses, and his wife, who smiles self-consciously. They must be new.

We talk for a while, DeWeese mainly explaining to them who I am, and then, from where the deck disappears around the corner of the house, suddenly comes Gennie DeWeese with a tray of beer cans. She is a painter too and, I'm suddenly aware, a quick comprehender and already there's a shared smile over the artistic economy of grabbing a can of beer instead of her hand, while she says, "Some neighbors just came over with a mess of trout for dinner. I'm so pleased." I try to think of something appropriate to say, but just nod.

We sit down, I in the sunlight, where it's difficult to distinguish details of the other side of the deck in the shade.

DeWeese looks at me, seems about to comment on my appearance, which is undoubtedly much different from what he remembers, but something deflects this and he turns to John instead and asks about the trip.

John explains that it's been just great, something he and Sylvia have needed for years.

Sylvia seconds this. "Just to be out in the open in all this space," she says.

"Lots of space in Montana," DeWeese says, a little wistfully. He and John and the art instructor become involved in get-acquainted talk about differences between Montana and Minnesota.

The horse grazes peacefully below us, and just beyond it the water sparkles in the creek. The talk has shifted to DeWeese's land here in the canyon, how long DeWeese has lived here and what art instruction at the college is like. John has a real gift for casual conversation like this that I've never had, so I just listen.

After a while the heat from the sun is so great I take off my sweater and open my shirt. Also to stop squinting I bring out some sunglasses and put them on. That's better, but it blanks out the shade so completely I can hardly see faces at all and leaves me feeling sort of visually detached from everything but the sun and the sunlit slopes of the canyon. I think to myself about unpacking but decide not to mention it. They know we're staying but just intuitively allow first things to happen first. First we relax, then we unpack. What's the hurry? The beer and sun begin to toast my head like a marshmallow. Very nice.

I don't know how much later I hear some comments about "the movie star here" come from John and I realize he is talking about me and my sunglasses. I look over the tops of them into the shade and make out that DeWeese and John and the art instructor are smiling at me. They must want me in the conversation, something about problems on the trip.

"They want to know what happens if something goes bad mechanically," John says.

I relate the whole story of the time Chris and I were in the rainstorm and the engine quit, which is a good story, but somewhat pointless, I realize as I'm telling it, as an answer to his question. The final line about being out of gas brings the expected groan.

"And I even told him to look," Chris says. Both DeWeese and Gennie comment on Chris's size. He becomes self-conscious and glows a little. They ask about his mother and his brother and we both answer these questions as best we can.

The heat of the sun finally becomes too much for me and I shift my chair into the shade. The marshmallow feeling leaves in the sudden chill and after a few minutes I have to button up. Gennie notices and says, "As soon as the sun goes over the ridge up there it gets really cold."

The distance between the sun and the ridge is narrow. I'd judge that although it's only the middle of the afternoon, less than half an hour of direct sun remains. John asks about the mountains in the winter and he and DeWeese and the art instructor talk about this and about snowshoeing in the mountains. I could just sit here forever.

Sylvia and Gennie and the art instructor's wife talk about the house and soon Gennie invites them inside.

My thoughts drift to the statement about Chris growing so fast and suddenly the feeling of the tomb comes on. I've heard only indirectly of the time Chris lived here, and yet to them it seems that he's hardly been gone. We live in entirely different time structures.

The conversation shifts onto what is current in art and music and theater and I'm surprised at how well John keeps up his end of the conversation. I'm not basically interested in what's new in these areas and he probably knows it and for that reason never talks about it to me. Just the reverse of the motorcycle maintenance situation. I wonder if I look as glassy-eyed now as he does when I talk about rods and pistons.

But what he and DeWeese really have in common is Chris and me, and a funny stickiness is developing here, ever since the movie-star comment. John's good-natured sarcasm toward his old drinking and cycling companion is chilling DeWeese slightly, causing resultant respectful tones toward me from DeWeese. These seem to increase John's sarcasm in a self-stoking way and they both sense this and so they kind of veer away from me onto some subject of agreement and then come back again but this stickiness develops and they veer away again onto another agreeable subject.

"Anyway," John says, "this character here told us we were in for a letdown when we came here, and we still haven't gotten over this `letdown."'

I laugh. I hadn't wanted to build him up to it. DeWeese smiles too. But then John turns to me and says, "Geez, you must have been really crazy, I mean really nuts to leave this place. I don't care what the college is like."

I see DeWeese look at him, shocked. Then angry. DeWeese looks at me and I wave it off. Some kind of impasse has developed but I don't know how to get around it. "It's a beautiful place," I say weakly.

DeWeese says defensively, "If you were here for a while you'd see another side to it." The instructor nods in agreement.

The impasse now produces its silence. It's an impossible one to reconcile. What John said wasn't unkind. He's kinder than anyone. What he knows and I know but DeWeese doesn't know is that the person they're both referring to isn't much these days. Just another middle-class, middle-aged person getting along. Worried mainly about Chris, but beyond that nothing special.

But what DeWeese and I know and the Sutherlands don't know is that there was someone, a person who lived here once, who was creatively on fire with a set

of ideas no one had ever heard of before, but then something unexplained and wrong happened and DeWeese doesn't know how or why and neither do I. The reason for the impasse, the bad feeling, is that DeWeese thinks that person is here now. And there's no way I can tell him otherwise.

For a brief moment, way up at the top of the ridge, the sun diffuses through the trees and a halation of the light comes down to us. The halo expands, capturing every-

thing in a sudden flash, and suddenly it catches me too.

"He saw too much," I say, still thinking about the impasse, but DeWeese looks puzzled and John doesn't register at all, and I realize the non sequitur too late. In the distance a single bird cries plaintively.

Now suddenly the sun is gone behind the mountain and the whole canyon is in dull shadow.

To myself I think how uncalled for that was. You don't make statements like that. You leave the hospital with the understanding that you don't.

Gennie appears with Sylvia and suggests we unpack. We agree and she shows us to our rooms. I see that my bed has a heavy quilt on it against the cold of the night. Beautiful room.

In three trips to the cycle and back I have everything transferred. Then I go to Chris's room to see what needs to be unpacked but he's cheerful and being grown-up and doesn't need help.

I look at him. "How do you like it here?"

He says, "Fine, but it isn't anything like the way you told about it last night."

"When?"

"Just before we went to sleep. In the cabin."

I don't know what he's referring to.

He adds, "You said it was lonely here."

"Why would I say that?"

"I don't know." My question frustrates him, so I leave it. He must have been dreaming.

When we come down to the living room I can smell the aroma from the frying trout in the kitchen. At one end of the room DeWeese is bent over the fireplace holding a match to some newspaper under the kindling. We watch him for a while.

"We use this fireplace all summer long," he says.

I reply, "I'm surprised it's this cold."

Chris says he's cold too. I send him back up for his sweater and mine as well.

"It's the evening wind," DeWeese says. "It sweeps down the canyon from up high where it's really cold."

The fire flares suddenly and then dies and then flares again from an uneven draft. It must be windy, I think, and look through the huge windows that line one wall of the living room. Across the canyon in the dusk I see the sharp movement of the trees.

"But that's right," DeWeese says. "You know how cold it is up there. You used to spend all your time up there."

"It brings back memories," I say.

A single fragment comes to mind now of night winds all around a campfire, smaller than this one before us now, sheltered in the rock against the high wind because there are no trees. Next to the fire are cooking gear and backpacks to help give wind shelter, and a canteen filled with water gathered from the melting snow. The water had to be collected early because above the timberline the snow stops melting when the sun goes down.

DeWeese says, "You've changed a lot." He is looking at me searchingly. His expression seems to ask whether this is a forbidden topic or not, and he gathers from looking at me that it is. He adds, "I guess we all have."

I reply, "I'm not the same person at all," and this seems to put him a little more at ease. Were he aware of the literal truth of that, he'd be a lot less at ease. "A lot has happened," I say, "and some things have come up that have made it important to try to untangle them a little, in my own mind at least, and that's partly why I'm here."

He looks at me, expecting something more, but the art instructor and his wife appear by the fireside and we drop it.

"The wind sounds like there'll be a storm tonight," the instructor says.

"I don't think so," DeWeese says.

Chris returns with the sweaters and asks if there are any ghosts up in the canyon.

DeWeese looks at him with amusement. "No, but there are wolves," he says.

Chris thinks about this and asks, "What do they do?"

DeWeese says, "They make trouble for the ranchers." He frowns. "They kill the young calves and lambs."

"Do they chase people?"

"l've never heard of it," DeWeese says and then, seeing that this disappoints Chris, adds, "but they could."

At dinner the brook trout is accompanied by glasses of Bay county Chablis. We sit separately in chairs and sofas around the living room. One entire side of this room has the windows which would overlook the canyon, except that now it's dark outside and the glass reflects the light from the fireplace. The glow of the fire is matched by an inner glow from the wine and fish and we don't say much except murmurs of appreciation.

Sylvia murmurs to John to notice the large pots and vases around the room.

"I was noticing those," John says. "Fantastic."

"Those were made by Peter Voulkas," Sylvia says.

"Is that right?"

"He was a student of Mr. DeWeese."

"Oh, for Christ's sake! I almost kicked one of those over."

DeWeese laughs.

Later John mumbles something a few times, looks up and announces, "This does it -- this just does the whole thing for us -- .Now we can go back for another eight years on Twenty-six-forty-nine Colfax Avenue."

Sylvia says mournfully, "Let's not talk about that."

John looks at me for a moment. "I suppose anybody with friends who can provide an evening like this can't be all bad." He nods gravely. "I'm going to have to take back all those things I thought about you."

"All of them?" I ask.

"Some, anyway."

DeWeese and the instructor smile and some of the impasse goes away.

After dinner Jack and Wylla Barsness arrive. More living images. Jack is recorded in the tomb fragments as a good person who writes and teaches English at the college. Their arrival is followed by that of a sculptor from northern Montana who herds sheep for his income. I gather from the way DeWeese introduces him that I'm not supposed to have met him before.

DeWeese says he is trying to persuade the sculptor to join the faculty and I say, "I'll try to talk him out of it," and sit down next to him, but conversation is very sticky because the sculptor is extremely serious and suspicious, evidently because I'm not an artist. He acts like I'm a detective trying to get something on him, and it isn't until he discovers I do a lot of welding that I become okay. Motorcycle maintenance opens strange doors. He says he welds for some of the same reasons I do. After you pick up skill, welding gives a tremendous feeling of power and control over the metal. You can do anything. He brings out some photographs of things he has welded and these show beautiful birds and animals with flowing metal surface textures that are not like anything else.

Later I move over and talk with Jack and Wylla. Jack is leaving to head an English department down in Boise, Idaho. His attitudes toward the department here seem guarded, but negative. They would be negative, of course, or he wouldn't be leaving. I seem to remember now he was a fiction writer mainly, who taught English, rather than a systematic scholar who taught English. There was a continuing split in the department along these lines which in part gave rise to, or at least accelerated the growth of, Phædrus' wild set of ideas which no one else had ever heard of, and Jack was supportive of Phædrus because, although he wasn't sure he knew what Phædrus was talking about, he saw it was something a fiction writer could work with better than linguistic analysis. It's an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it's done and the talk about how it's done never seems to match how one does it.

DeWeese brings over some instructions for assembly of an outdoor barbecue rotisserie which he wants me to evaluate as a professional technical writer. He's spent a whole afternoon trying to get the thing together and he wants to see these instructions totally damned.

But as I read them they look like ordinary instructions to me and I'm at a loss to find anything wrong with them. I don't want to say this, of course, so I hunt hard for something to pick on. You can't really tell whether a set of instructions is all right until you check it against the device or procedure it describes, but I see a page separation that prevents reading without flipping back and forth between the text and illustration...always a poor practice. I jump on this very hard and DeWeese encourages every jump. Chris takes the instructions to see what I mean.

But while I'm jumping on this and describing some of the agonies of misinterpretation that bad cross- referencing can produce, I've a feeling that this isn't why DeWeese found them so hard to understand. It's just the lack of smoothness and continuity which threw him off. He's unable to comprehend things when they appear in the ugly, chopped-up, grotesque sentence style common to engineering and technical writing. Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and DeWeese works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bits and pieces presumed. What he really wants me to damn is the lack of artistic continuity, something an engineer couldn't care less about. It hangs up, really, on the classic-romantic split, like everything else about technology.

But Chris, meanwhile, takes the instructions and folds them around in a way I hadn't thought of so that the illustration sits there right next to the text. I double-take this, then triple-take it and feel like a movie cartoon character who has just walked beyond the edge of a cliff but hasn't fallen yet because he hasn't realized his predicament. I nod, and there's silence, and then I realize my predicament, then a long laughter as I pound Chris on the top of the head all the way down to the bottom of the canyon. When the laughter subsides, I say, "Well, anyway -- " but the laughter starts all over again.

"What I wanted to say," I finally get in, "is that I've a set of instructions at home which open up great realms for the improvement of technical writing. They begin, `Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.' "

This produces more laughter, but Sylvia and Gennie and the sculptor give sharp looks of recognition.

"That's a good instruction," the sculptor says. Gennie nods too.

"That's kind of why I saved it," I say. "At first I laughed because of memories of bicycles I'd put together and, of course, the unintended slur on Japanese manufacture. But there's a lot of wisdom in that statement."

John looks at me apprehensively. I look at him with equal apprehension. We both laugh. He says, "The professor will now expound."

"Peace of mind isn't at all superficial, really," I expound. "It's the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test's always your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself."

They just look at me, thinking about this.

"It's an unconventional concept," I say, "but conventional reason bears it out. The material object of observation, the bicycle or rotisserie, can't be right or wrong. Molecules are molecules. They don't have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine's always your own mind. There isn't any other test."

DeWeese asks, "What if the machine is wrong and I feel peaceful about it?"

Laughter.

I reply, "That's self-contradictory. If you really don't care you aren't going to know it's wrong. The thought'll never occur to you. The act of pronouncing it wrong's a form of caring."

I add, "What's more common is that you feel unpeaceful even if it's right, and I think that's the actual case here. In this case, if you're worried, it isn't right. That means it isn't checked out thoroughly enough. In any industrial situation a machine that isn't checked out is a `down' machine and can't be used even though it may work perfectly. Your worry about the rotisserie is the same thing. You haven't completed the ultimate requirement of achieving peace of mind, because you feel these instructions were too complicated and you may not have understood them correctly."

DeWeese asks, "Well, how would you change them so I would get this peace of mind?"

"That would require a lot more study than I've just given them now. The whole thing goes very deep. These rotisserie instructions begin and end exclusively with the machine. But the kind of approach I'm thinking about doesn't cut it off so narrowly. What's really angering about instructions of this sort is that they imply there's only one way to put this rotisserie together...their way. And that presumption wipes out all the creativity. Actually there are hundreds of ways to put the rotisserie together and when they make you follow just one way without showing you the overall problem the instructions become hard to follow in such a way as not to make mistakes. You lose feeling for the work. And not only that, it's very unlikely that they've told you the best way."

"But they're from the factory," John says.

"I'm from the factory too," I say "and I know how instructions like this are put together. You go out on the assembly line with a tape recorder and the foreman sends you to talk to the guy he needs least, the biggest goof-off he's got, and whatever he tells you...that's the instructions. The next guy might have told you something completely different and probably better, but he's too busy." They all look surprised. "I might have known," DeWeese says.

"It's the format," I say. "No writer can buck it. Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is. And when you presume there's just one right way to do things, of course the instructions begin and end exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That's why you need the peace of mind."

"Actually this idea isn't so strange," I continue. "Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you'll see the difference. The craftsman isn't ever following a single line of instruction. He's making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he'll be absorbed and attentive to what he's doing even though he doesn't deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn't following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind's at rest at the same time the material's right."

"Sounds like art," the instructor says.

"Well, it is art," I say. "This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It's just that it's gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous."

They're not sure whether I'm kidding or not.

"You mean," DeWeese asks, "that when I was putting this rotisserie together I was actually sculpting it?"

"Sure."

He goes over this in his mind, smiling more and more. "I wish I'd known that," he says. Laughter follows.

Chris says he doesn't understand what I'm saying. "That's all right, Chris," Jack Barsness says. "We don't either." More laughter.

"I think I'll just stay with ordinary sculpture," the sculptor says.

"I think I'll just stick to painting," DeWeese says.

"I think I'll just stick to drumming," John says.

Chris asks, "What are you going to stick to?"

"Mah guns, boy, mah guns," I tell him. "That's the Code of the West."

They all laugh hard at this, and my speechifying seems forgiven. When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.

The conversation breaks up into groups and I spend the rest of the party talking to Jack and Wylla about developments in the English department.

After the party is over and the Sutherlands and Chris have gone to bed, DeWeese recalls my lecture, however. He says seriously, "What you said about the rotisserie instructions was interesting."

Gennie adds, also seriously, "It sounded like you had been thinking about it for a long time."

"I've been thinking about concepts that underlie it for twenty years," I say.

Beyond the chair in front of me, sparks fly up the chimney, drawn by the wind outside, now stronger than before.

I add, almost to myself, "You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.

"All that talk about technology and art is part of a pattern that seems to have emerged from my own life. It represents a transcendence from something I think a lot of others may be trying to transcend."

"What's that?"

"Well, it isn't just art and technology. It's a kind of a noncoalescence between reason and feeling. What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that. People haven't paid much attention to this before because the big concern has been with food, clothing and shelter for everyone and technology has provided these.

"But now where these are assured, the ugliness is being noticed more and more and people are asking if we must always suffer spiritually and esthetically in order to satisfy material needs. Lately it's become almost a national crisis...antipollution drives, antitechnological communes and styles of life, and all that."

Both DeWeese and Gennie have understood all this for so long there's no need for comment, so I add, "What's emerging from the pattern of my own life is the for belief that the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can't be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones who're solving it are solving it at a personal level by abandoning `square' rationality altogether and going by feelings alone. Like John and Sylvia here. And millions of others like them. And that seems like a wrong direction too. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the solution to the problem isn't that you abandon rationality but that you expand the nature of rationality so that it's capable of coming up with a solution."

"I guess I don't know what you mean," Gennie says.

"Well, it's quite a bootstrap operation. It's analogous to the kind of hang-up Sir Isaac Newton had when he wanted to solve problems of instantaneous rates of change. It was unreasonable in his time to think of anything changing within a zero amount of time. Yet it's almost necessary mathematically to work with other zero quantities, such as points in space and time that no one thought were unreasonable at all, although there was no real difference. So what Newton did was say, in effect, `We're going to presume there's such a thing as instantaneous change, and see if we can find ways of determining what it is in various applications.' The result of this presumption is the branch of mathematics known as the calculus, which every engineer uses today. Newton invented a new form of reason. He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think what is needed now is a similar expansion of reason to handle technological ugliness. The trouble is that the expansion has to be made at the roots, not at the branches, and that's what makes it hard to see.

"We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I've heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know. Everyone's familiar with that. I think the same thing occurs with whole civilizations when expansion's needed at the roots.

"You look back at the last three thousand years and with hindsight you think you see neat patterns and chains of cause and effect that have made things the way they are. But if you go back to original sources, the literature of any particular era, you find that these causes were never apparent at the time they were supposed to be operating. During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus' discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn't deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason.

"Columbus has become such a schoolbook stereotype it's almost impossible to imagine him as a living human being anymore. But if you really try to hold back your present knowledge about the consequences of his trip and project yourself into his situation, then sometimes you can begin to see that our present moon exploration must be like a tea party compared to what he went through. Moon exploration doesn't involve real root expansions of thought. We've no reason to doubt that existing forms of thought are adequate to handle it. It's really just a branch extension of what Columbus did. A really new exploration, one that would look to us today the way the world looked to Columbus, would have to be in an entirely new direction."

"Like what?"

"Like into realms beyond reason. I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there.

"But what's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences."

"I'm not sure what you mean by classical reason."

"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You've never had to understand it really. It's always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I'm talking about. Some people still condemn it because it doesn't make `sense.' But what's really wrong is not the art but the `sense,' the classical reason, which can't grasp it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art's more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in the branches, they're at the roots."

A rush of wind comes furiously now, down from the mountaintop. "The ancient Greeks," I say, "who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future. They listened to the wind and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventors of reason sound insane?"

DeWeese squints. "How could they tell the future from the wind?"

"I don't know, maybe the same way a painter can tell the future of his painting by staring at the canvas. Our whole system of knowledge stems from their results. We've yet to understand the methods that produced these results."

I think for a while, then say, "When I was last here, did I talk much about the Church of Reason?"

"Yes, you talked a lot about that."

"Did I ever talk about an individual named Phædrus?"

"No."

"Who was he?" Gennie asks.

"He was an ancient Greek -- a rhetorician -- a `composition major' of his time. He was one of those present when reason was being invented."

"You never talked about that, I don't think."

"That must have come later. The rhetoricians of ancient Greece were the first teachers in the history of the Western world. Plato vilified them in all his works to grind an axe of his own and since what we know about them is almost entirely from Plato they're unique in that they've stood condemned throughout history without ever having their side of the story told. The Church of Reason that I talked about was founded on their graves. It's supported today by their graves. And when you dig deep into its foundations you come across ghosts."

I look at my watch. It's after two. "It's a long story," I say.

"You should write all this down," Gennie says.

I nod in agreement. "I'm thinking about a series of lecture-essays...a sort of Chautauqua. I've been trying to work them out in my mind as we rode out here -- which is probably why I sound so primed on all this stuff. It's all so huge and difficult. Like trying to travel through these mountains on foot.

"The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It's never been anything else, ever, but you can't get that across in an essay."

"You should do it anyway," Gennie says. "Without trying to get it perfect."

"I suppose," I say.

DeWeese asks, "Does this tie in with what you were doing on `Quality'?"

"It's the direct result of it," I say.

I remember something and look at DeWeese. "Didn't you advise me to drop it?"

"I said no one had ever succeeded in doing what you were trying to do."

"Do you think it's possible?"

"I don't know. Who knows?" His expression is really concerned. "A lot of people are listening better these days. Particularly the kids. They're really listening -- and not just at you...to you -- to you. It makes all the difference."

The wind coming down from the snowfields up above sounds for a long time throughout the house. It grows loud and high as if in hope of sweeping the whole house, all of us, away into nothing, leaving the canyon as it once was, but the house stands and the wind dies away again, defeated. Then it comes back, feinting a light blow from the far side, then suddenly a heavy gust from our side.

"I keep listening to the wind," I say. I add, "I think when the Sutherlands have left, Chris and I should do some climbing up to where that wind starts. I think it's time he got a better look at that land."

"You can start from right here," DeWeese says, "and head back up the canyon. There's no road for seventy-five miles."

"Then this is where we'll start," I say.