A handsome man wearing battered black boots and faded jeans and a denim jacket decorated with patches and pins stands before one of the doorways. A view of a desert, of endless drifts and dunes and a white-hot sun that seems to hunger after whatever beings might venture beneath it.
He wears a pack on his back, a secondhand Boy Scout pack bought at a thrift store in some other world. He has packed his gunna for this journey, a familiar journey, and folded up an empty duffle bag inside it--that had been intended for another use, but that use is perhaps past now. It may come again. The wheel turns. He grins at the view before him.
Clicky-clocky bootheels have led him to this time and place and doorway. Clicky clocky bootheels have led him through time and space and it is by chance or by fate or by what some might call ka that he stands here now. And here, at this doorway, he stands a while, pondering his journey across such a small gap, a doorway, and into another world.
A familiar thing, this desert. He has seen it before. He knows he has seen it before. And he knows that he is bound unto this track as are so many and there are times when the endlessness of this existence, this turning and turning, threaten to break even the kind of supernatural madness that rests within his brain. But that is another matter. For there are ways to break that track. And he has the ways and means.
A familiar thing too, to step through such a door, from world to world, as though they were only rooms. For so they are. If no place better proves the truth of the Tower for those who do not believe, it is the City. (And the room at the top?) The City may be a connection point of many universes, and its structure, the twelve buildings and the ring around which it all has settled, echoes Beam and Way and Tower alike. Such is the way of the universe.
The universe, of course, is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a non-living brain--although it may think it can--the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.
The truth about the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe--universes, indeed, but let it stand for both--is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in the world we know, more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind--no, nor woman's either--can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
The prosaic fact of the universe's existence alone defeats both the pragmatic and the romantic.
The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size defeats us.
He took a step forward, smiling, feeling the dry air filter through that doorway now.
A man seeks his own destiny and no other. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well.
He stood before the door that opened on the desert, with its sands as numerous as stars but fewer than the universes that spun in their tracks and in their own realm, their own orbits about the Tower.
That same desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.
A hairless and foul-tempered cat is crouched on top of his pack. It yowls and whines and growls and flexes vicious claws into the pack and wears a harness and a leash and he speaks to it over his shoulder, grinning all the while.
"Well, Larry, let's head on. You're gonna love this place. And there's a guy I know that I think you'd like to meet. You might even get a chance to kick around a few more places after this. Whatcha think?"
The cat yowls, as is its wont. He laughs as is his--a laugh that rings brightly dark into the desert before them. He pulls the hood of his jacket over his head.
He settled his pack a little higher on his shoulders and set off.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed...
no subject
He wears a pack on his back, a secondhand Boy Scout pack bought at a thrift store in some other world. He has packed his gunna for this journey, a familiar journey, and folded up an empty duffle bag inside it--that had been intended for another use, but that use is perhaps past now. It may come again. The wheel turns. He grins at the view before him.
Clicky-clocky bootheels have led him to this time and place and doorway. Clicky clocky bootheels have led him through time and space and it is by chance or by fate or by what some might call ka that he stands here now. And here, at this doorway, he stands a while, pondering his journey across such a small gap, a doorway, and into another world.
A familiar thing, this desert. He has seen it before. He knows he has seen it before. And he knows that he is bound unto this track as are so many and there are times when the endlessness of this existence, this turning and turning, threaten to break even the kind of supernatural madness that rests within his brain. But that is another matter. For there are ways to break that track. And he has the ways and means.
A familiar thing too, to step through such a door, from world to world, as though they were only rooms. For so they are. If no place better proves the truth of the Tower for those who do not believe, it is the City. (And the room at the top?) The City may be a connection point of many universes, and its structure, the twelve buildings and the ring around which it all has settled, echoes Beam and Way and Tower alike. Such is the way of the universe.
The universe, of course, is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a non-living brain--although it may think it can--the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.
The truth about the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe--universes, indeed, but let it stand for both--is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in the world we know, more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind--no, nor woman's either--can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
The prosaic fact of the universe's existence alone defeats both the pragmatic and the romantic.
The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size defeats us.
He took a step forward, smiling, feeling the dry air filter through that doorway now.
A man seeks his own destiny and no other. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well.
He stood before the door that opened on the desert, with its sands as numerous as stars but fewer than the universes that spun in their tracks and in their own realm, their own orbits about the Tower.
That same desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.
A hairless and foul-tempered cat is crouched on top of his pack. It yowls and whines and growls and flexes vicious claws into the pack and wears a harness and a leash and he speaks to it over his shoulder, grinning all the while.
"Well, Larry, let's head on. You're gonna love this place. And there's a guy I know that I think you'd like to meet. You might even get a chance to kick around a few more places after this. Whatcha think?"
The cat yowls, as is its wont. He laughs as is his--a laugh that rings brightly dark into the desert before them. He pulls the hood of his jacket over his head.
He settled his pack a little higher on his shoulders and set off.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed...