The Way Through Doors

First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.

--Let us make a pact, she said. To madness at every juncture!

The old man began to sing. His voice was very lovely and obviously a part of something that the world had disposed of in its haste, evidence of a grander, kinder past.

I mean that the book had better make life better better in at least six or seven definite ways immediately. Also, there had better be somewhere in it a method for handling fortune and chance so as to best provoke the most complicated, involved, and glorious refractions of what's possible.

The old man took out an extraordinarily beautiful and elegant handkerchief and gave it to her to dry her tears. It was the sort of handkerchief that one might be content to be judged by if it was all that remained of one after one's death.

The old man sang for a while, and Mora felt in her head the beginning of a long siege. A wilderness had crept up around a walled town, and the darkness of old woods and far-off places began to grow then, even within sight of where men walked together. By this she meant in her heart that all the useless things one remembers well just before waking and forgets just after were in fact very important and perhaps all that stood now between herself and oblivion.

It is for this girl that the young man is looking. Day after day he wakes in morning and goes searching for her. In his work, and in his life on mornings that are not miraculous and afternoons that are sundry and various, he saves the corners of his eyes for her, and watches at all times the entrances and exits of every establishment to which he comes. For he knows that eventually, in time and given some protracted period of days, weeks, and months, he will come up on her, and know her in an instant for who she is.