Fred Daniels’s roused and tense sensibilities register everything he sees in terms of a man about to make a decision. The decision he does make is determined by what he can take for granted. He goes directly to the police, who had branded him guilty, when he has seen his fill in the underground. Where else is there for him to go? The police have given him his meaningful life, such as it is, filled with horror. This is not surprising; my grandmother was a stickler for obeying all the laws she hated and condemned. Christ had His logic when obliquely, he confessed His Godship to authority. (To avoid looseness, I might add that had Fred Daniels been lucky enough to have had a different past, dream, and tradition, he would have acted differently.) The criminal who returns, in spite of himself, to the scene of his crime, the murderer, full of remorse, who goes to the police, is performing more than an overt act. He is completing a logical circle of feeling over which he, within the limits in which he lives, has no control. Man does not and cannot live alone, and if he tries to, he ceases to be a man. To return to that which first stamped upon one’s sensibilities the meaningful patterns of value is as natural as a swimmer returning to the sandy, solid shore from which he took off in a dive. What shore any man returns to depends upon what he saw while swimming and the kind of shore from which he first took off. . . .

If dream is tradition, then ritual is waking sleep. Unfortunately, we in America have few real rituals. But in ritual each item of the past is an over-determined detail of the dream come alive. The emotions of past days are about to go, but a new emotion is poured out upon the old details to preserve the past. New goals and perspectives are powerful enough to transfer new meaning to the ritual details. In ritual past is never completely past; the present is never completely present; and the future does not exist alone like a curtain hung before the eyes. Instead, they are together, as one; tense, taut, filling the personality with meaning.

Hence the inevitable abstract quality—I have already mentioned before that there was a kind of abstract quality in my grandmother’s life—in the way Fred Daniels ties things together, the way in which he ignores the personalities of people, the way he lumps them all into one huge crowd as candidates for eternity. The tunneling through walls, the holes bored through brick, are all for the purpose of allowing Fred Daniels to see the fragments of an environment; I selected his world for him, but he ties the items of this world together on the basis of his past conditioning. His crawling around in sewers might be linked to anyone’s sense of groping through the days of one’s life.