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The dream was what he used to consider a mystical vision, but finally came to understand as a natural imagining for someone who— Well, someone who just happened to have had Goines’ early experiences. To have lived Goines’ life to that point.
The dream did present itself as a vision, for in it Goines passively beheld a Universe – or one of its galaxies – filled with golden light, pervaded by an eloquent silence so profound it could have been composed by Bach, if not by an angel.
In this light danced the most beautiful specks of dust, and Goines understood, with a sense of knowing that felt self-validating, that he was utterly dependent upon the Creator of this Universe for his own existence. He had not created himself. He could not even ensure that he would take another breath. He had not created any of those specks of dust. And he could not create one.
Yet, viewing that wondrous field of golden light, listening to that profound silence, utterly sure of his creaturehood, Goines felt at peace, calm. He was still now – more than 50 years after the dream – utterly sure of his own creaturehood, but he felt less peaceful. He was restless, for one thing, although he must have been restless as a 22-year-old as well.
Maybe Goines was more restless now? Maybe he still had many things he wanted to do, only 50 fewer years to do them?
But Goines was pretty sure that something other than his own mortality had taken away his peace and calm, and he thought it must be the impending deaths that humans collectively were bringing to so many other creatures – non-human ones – deaths far beyond road-killed snakes, turtles, and so on. Not just individual deaths like those, but the deaths of whole species.
Goines wasn’t sure about that, though, for while the death of a whole species was a dreadful thing, he realized with a start that his sadness about the death of a species was somehow abstract, an idea more than a feeling.
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