When he is at his work - if he has any, for he may be one who is being merely kept alive, not being used, or stretched, or developed through his labour - he, at his work, again and again, because the need is so old, renews himself in the thought that this work of his benefits others, that it links him with others, he is in a creative mesh and pulse with all the labourers of the earth... but he is checked, is stopped, the thought cannot live on in him, there is bitterness and anger, and then a weariness, disbelief: he does not know why, she does not know why, but it is as if they are pouring away the best of themselves into nothingness.
She and he, making order in their living place, tidying and cleaning their home, stand together among piles of glass, synthetics, paper, cans, containers - the rubbish of their civilisation which, they know, is farmland and food and the labour of men and women, rubbish, rubbish, to be carried away and dumped in great mountains that cover more earth, foul more water. As they clear and smooth their little rooms, it is with a rising, hardly controllable irritability and disgust. A container that has held food is thrown away, but over vast areas of Shikasta it would be treasured and used by millions of desperate people. Yet there is nothing to be done, it seems. Yet it all happens, it goes on, nothing seems to stop it. Rage, frustration, disgust at themselves, at their society, anger - breaking out against each other, against neighbours, against the child. Nothing they can touch, or see, or handle sustains them, nowhere can they take refuge in the simple good sense of nature. He has seen once a pumpkin vine sprawling its great leaves and yellow flowers and sumptuous golden globes over a vast rubbish heap, where flies sizzle and simmer - at the time he hardly noticed it, and now it is an image for his imagination to find rest in, and comfort. She watches a neighbour trying to burn bits of plastic on a bonfire, while the chemical reek poisons everything, and she shuts her eyes and thinks of a broken earthenware bowl swept out of a back door in a village, to crumble slowly back into the soil.
In all of man's history he has been able to restore himself with the sight of leaves in autumn that will sink back into the earth, or with the look of a crumbling wall with sun on it, or some white bones at the edge of a stream.
These two stand together, high above their city, looking out where the machines that are destroying them rush and grind, in the air, on the earth, under the earth... they stand breathing, but the rhythm of their breath shortens and changes, as they think that the air is full of corrosion and destruction.
They turn taps and handles and water runs out willingly from the walls, but as they bend to drink or to wash they find their instincts reluctant and have to force themselves. The water tastes flat, and faintly corrupt, and has been already ten times through their gut and bladders, and they know that the time will come when they will not be able to drink it, and, setting out containers for rainwater, will find that, too, undrinkable from chemicals washed from the air.
They watch a flight of birds, as they stand together at their windows, and it is as if they are sorrowfully saying goodbye, with a silent corrosive, tearing apology on behalf of the species they belong to: destruction is what they have brought to these creatures, destruction and poisoning is their gift, and the swerve and balancing of a bird does not delight and rest, but becomes another place from which they learn to avert their eyes, in pain.
This woman, this man, restless, irritable, grief-stricken, sleeping too much to forget their situation or unable to sleep, looking everywhere for some good or sustenance that will not at once give way as they reach out for it and slide off into reproach or nothingness - one of them takes up a leaf from the pavement, carries it home, stares at it. There it lies in a palm, a brilliant gold, a curled, curved, sculptored thing, balanced like a feather, ready to float and to glide, there it rests, lightly, for a breath may move it, in that loosely open, slightly damp, human palm, and the mind meditating there sees its supporting ribs, the myriads of its veins branching, and rebranching, its capillaries, the minuscule areas of its flesh which are not - as it seems to this brooding human eye - fragments of undifferentiated substance between the minute feeding arteries and veins, but, if one could see them, highly structured worlds, the resources of chemical and microscopic cell life, viruses, bacteria - a universe in each pin-point of leaf. It is already being dragged into the soil as it lies there captive, a shape as perfect as a ship's sail in full wind or the shell of a snail. But what is being looked at is not this curved exquisite exactness, for the slightest shift of vision shows the shape of matter thinning, fraying, attacked by a thousand forces of growth and death. And this is what an eye tuned slightly, only slightly, differently would see looking out of the window at that tree which shed the leaf on to the pavement - since it is autumn and the tree's need to conserve energy against the winter is on it - no, not a tree, but a fighting seething mass of matter in the extremes of tension, growth, destruction, a myriad of species of smaller and smaller creatures feeding on each other, each feeding on the other, always - that is what this tree is in reality, and this man, this woman, crouched tense over the leaf, feels nature as a roaring creative fire in whose crucible species are born and die and are reborn in every breath... every life...every culture... every world... the mind, wrenched away from its resting place in the close visible cycles of growth and renewal and decay, the simplicities of birth and death, is forced back, and back and into itself, coming to rest - tentatively and without expectation - where there can be no rest, in the thought that always, at every time, there have been species, creatures, new shapes of being, making harmonious wholes of interacting parts, but these over and over again crash! are swept away! - crash go the empires and the civilisations, and the explosions that are to come will lay to waste seas and oceans and islands and cities, and make poisoned deserts where the teeming detailed inventive life was, and where the mind and heart used to rest, but may no longer, but must go forth like the dove sent by Noah, and at last after long circling and cycling see a distant mountaintop emerging from wastes of soiled water, and must settle there, looking around at nothing, nothing, but the wastes of death and destruction, but cannot rest there either, knowing that tomorrow or next week or in a thousand years, this mountaintop too will topple under the force of a comet's passing, or the arrival of a meteorite.
The man, the woman, sitting humbly in the corner of their room, stare at that indescribably perfect thing, a golden chestnut leaf in autumn, when it has just floated down from the tree, and then may perform any one of a number of acts that rise from inside themselves, and that they could not justify nor argue with or against - they may simply close a hand over it, crushing it to powder, and fling the stuff out of the window, watching the dust sink through the air to the pavement, for there is a relief in thinking that the rains of next week will seep the leaf-stuff back through the soil to the roots, so that next year, at least, it will shine in the air again. Or the woman may put the leaf gently on a blue plate and set it on a table, and may even bow before it, ironically, and with a sort of apology that is so near to the thoughts and actions of Shikastans now, and think that the laws that made this shape must be, must be, must be stronger in the end than the slow distorters and perverters of the substance of life. Or the man, glancing out of the window, forcing himself to see the tree in its other truth, that of the fierce and furious war of eating and being eaten, may see suddenly, for an instant, so that it has gone even as he turns to call his wife: Look, look, quick! - behind the seethe and scramble and eating that is one truth, and behind the ordinary tree-in-autumn that is the other - a third, a tree of a fine, high, shimmering light, like shaped sunlight. A world, a world, another world, another truth...