Given that the world resembles the world, there is an aura of calm surrounding the Lost People--never beginning a particular road they never risk a wrong turn or an end. A mindless (being either above or below mind, if not on a totally different scale) journey like sleeping with your eyes open in the clear and cold.

You can just hear someone (you) saying: can you ask a stranger directions, knowing in your heart his need to answer will exceed his answer--ask, knowing he will almost always answer wrongly or incoherently. And can you follow his directions any way? Can you ask directions without saying where you want to go? Will you follow because he's a special man or because he is just another man?

A rather impressionable young girl asked a man directions yesterday at the edge of a field. He said, "Wait a minute" in an odd tone of belligerence and longing and continued talking to the cow: "What is it like to be a cow?" he asked.

The cow asked him whether he knew the story of the wren and the mole, or of the grass-hopper who fell in love with a water-lilly, or of why the little men in the grass are unable to eat barley? Thrice, he replied "No."

"'I can't explain anything to you,' she said, and walked quickly back to a tree." Willingly suspending her disbelief, the girl was led off towards the highway by the man. He said they would go on a journey together. She, being impressionable, but not stupid, thought to fend him off with a stock plagiarism, "You look about as much like my grandmother as Calvin Coolidge looks like the MGM lion." He, cleverly, ignored her. She, feeling somewhat naked, had no choice but to go with him. The idea is in the mood. They spoke. Albion Moonlight and she.

Inviting others along the way. Take his hand if you like. Ask whatever you like, in questions that are not. If you won't play, don't come along--they played a game for the self-in-dulgent, or, at most, for the activist or the idealist-realist, momentary comfort in the irrelevant. Why not ask? Only the wise can be humiliated.

Midway between idiocy and profundity, he dragged her on like a half-dead cat waiting for its next life. He pointed out an angel with a slit throat lying by the roadside. The myths have collapsed and they journeyed faceless.

"What we did not know was how near madness we would be; how alone; how defenseless: how beset we were with what we had heard, with what we had been taught--this, especially, we did not know."

The passage from Galen (which is somewhere) was irrevocable. Moonlight moved towards death in the growing eye of Keddel (who is someone), talking, never writing and so his words were embarrassing, almost sentimental. She, with her cool exterior, was astonished. His eloquence was the danger--he talked with such ease of all the normal things--of birth and death and life and love and art and war and soul--with the kind of maxims one wants to take to bed. And yet in the end are never satisfying.

FEAR

"A stick with which we are forced to beat each other."

MADNESS

"It is feeling your hand but you won't say I have a hand because you cannot believe it."

It is World War II. Can you escape it if you become a soldier? You will not have to choose to kill the man or even to follow the order to kill the man who has a baby who throws up and a wife who has babies and a dog who makes water on his garden ("He doesn't forget who he is--").

"TO HATE A THING FOR ITS OWN SAKE -- THERE IS THE MIRACLE"