It turned out that Cinq, one of three cats in my family, had already said about all I could ever say.
This is what he said in one of the last chapters of The Cream Soup Spoon.
He had just been asked if he could describe the meaning of life.
“Maybe not. But maybe. If maybe, how about this?”
“Imagine yourself in the ultimate dream. It is ultimate for its strangeness. It is ultimate for its familiarity. It is ultimate for its feeling of urgency and proximity. A series of sights and sounds have flown past your view, and you have almost lost yourself into each as it has passed. But you have remained immobile and unmoved by the visions.
“And then everything folds backwards upon itself. The time of a clock that appears from nowhere is at hyper speed even as it stands still, even as its hands pass one another intermittently backwards, even as it blurs, even as it disappears. A sense of mortality blends with the realization of boundaries. The dream is not a dream. The dream is reality. And reality is a dream. And the boundaries fade and opportunities lost and achievements unattained loom and overwhelm. Whatever it had been that one had ever thought that one might be or might have been is becoming a neatly wrapped package; it is becoming a sleekly designed capsule. And then some infinite unseen and unseeable facility or force compresses it all – the hopes, the dreams, the illusions, the achievements, the misses and near misses, the loves, the hates, the intentions good and the attentions bad - into an expendable portion and inserts it into infinity.”
“And then think about the mirrors, the matrixes, the scutes and the slime of time across and intersected with all of that: the mélange of what is, or could be”.
Cinq jumped to the floor and went to Peter’s feet and sat.
“That pretty well sums it up”.
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