There is no more tragic loss in the whole world, he thought, than missing the Third State. It happens because of the news on the radio, because of business, because of hollow desires and the pursuit of vanities and trivia. All suffering, Fima said to himself, everything that is ridiculous or obscene, is purely the consequence of missing the Third State, or of that vague nagging feeling that reminds us from time to time that there is, outside and inside, almost within reach, something fundamental that you always seem on the way to yet you always lose your way to. You are called, and you forget to go. You are spoken to, and you don’t hear. A door is opened, and you leave too late because you choose to satisfy some craving or other. “The sea of silence casts up secrets,” but you were preoccupied with trivial arrangements. You preferred to try to make an impression on someone, who himself missed it because he wanted to make an impression on someone else, who also . . . and so on, and so forth. Unto dust. Again and again you rejected what exists in favor of what does not, never did, and cannot. Gad Eitan was right when he said that wastefulness runs riot here. His wife was right to get away while she could. The order of priorities, Fima said to himself sadly and half aloud, is all wrong. What a pity, for instance, that Tsvi Kropotkin, such a hard-working man, should have spent three years chasing after the details of the Catholic church’s attitude to the voyages of Magellan and Columbus, like someone sorting out the buttons of clothes that have long since become rags. Or Uri Gefen, running from one affair to the next, wide awake but with his heart asleep.