last lines of 5771:

What's outside the window?

To this day, free access to the preserve is granted only to birds and to residents of the Canterbridge Estates, through a gate whose lock combination is known to them, beneath a small ceramic sign with a picture of the pretty young dark-skinned girl after whom the preserve is named.

Sometimes a wind comes before the rain and sends birds sailing past the window, spirit birds that ride the night, stranger than dreams.

And this is it.

The dark-windowed locomotive is sinister, the train seemingly about to explode off the wall, leap through the air, and shatter into a shower of red-hot shrapnel.

He bowed low, right down to the ground, in front of the man sitting there motionless, whose smile reminded him of everything that he had ever loved in his life, of everything that had ever been of value and holy in his life.

He says that he will never die.

The cults of the famous and the dead.

"Don't ask me why, old sport," said Stony, "but somebody up there likes you."

justice is everywhere and it's working

and the machine guns and the frogs

and the hedges will tell you

so.

"We'll take in a quick bite at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe."

To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.

Gosh, it sure is pretty... isn't it?

Go on, go on into the Light, into the peace, into the living peace of the Clear Light.

And when all the people were dispersed she still stood alone upon the sea-wall, remembering in her heart his saying, "A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me."

May the year that is at hand uphold and strengthen you in that.

I had never known, never ever imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.

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So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old brokendown river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the evening-star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks in the west and folds the last and final shore in, and nobody, just nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Neal Cassady, I even think of Old Neal Cassady the father we never found, I think of Neal Cassady, I think of Neal Cassady.

But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.

"Yeah," I said. "He ought to be good at that."

that space

there

before they get to us

ensures

that

when they do

they won't

get it all

ever.