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Show -107 than raisins. I wondered if I shouldn't give it up (give what up? I couldn't say but it felt like something enormously important), climb down and go home. I perceived myself hanging between two worlds: on one side those infinitely distant, hard-hearted reaches of space-on the other side home, bed, my girl-wife. On one side Maybelle and the world of rules, where a man could behave well or behave badly; on the other a dangerous interesting universe where nothing was allowed, therefore everything was allowed. I saw in a flash that it was ail a joke--the wonder was that it had taken me so many years to start laughing. With eyes full of tears I looked up and out: between me and cold dark space was nothing but a few miles of inconsequential atmosphere, air so thin I couldn't see it- comparatively no thicker than a peach's tenuous and delicate skin is to the fruit it contains. But sufficient. 0 miracle of life! Sufficient! Later I watched the perfect round red globe of the sun balance itself on the tallest peak of the Santa Rita Mountains like a ball on a circus seal's black nose. When I got tired of the comparison I slipped silently down the lader, collapsed the boom and tied it down in its iron crotch, and drove away to New York. |