Finis

So in America when the sun goes down ... I think of Dean Moriarty. For I had walked thus far with my lady on the hill, and I didn't know what came next; all I saw was the rift. Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her. Yet my eyes decieved me; she turned suddenly and said: "I must go in, the fog is rising." She left me with my lighted expanses. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth. But then I heard a strangely familiar voice retelling: "They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way." Just so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. But that is the beginning of a new story - the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended."