Fima - Amos Oz [113]
And so Fima's thoughts arrived at the hackneyed concept of "the heavenly Jerusalem," to which he gave his private interpretation, valid solely for what he felt at that particular moment. He mused that there were times when the state of sleeping seemed less tainted with falsehood than the state of waking, and times when it was the other way around, and that ultimate wakefulness was the most longed-for ideal. He now reached the thought that it might be a matter of three states and not two: sleeping, waking, and this light that had been flooding him both from without and within ever since the start of this morning. For want of a suitable name he described the light to himself as the Third State. And he felt that it was not only a matter of the pure light on the hills but of the light truly flowing out of the hills and out of himself too, and that it was in the commingling of these rays of light that the Third State came into being, equidistant from complete waking and from the deepest slumber and yet distinct from both.
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.
With that, Fima decided to stop standing idly at the window and to start getting the place ready for the painters, who were coming after the weekend. The pictures would have to come down off the walls. Also the map of Israel on which he had once penciled reasonable compromise borders. All the furniture would have to be moved into the middle of the room and covered with plastic sheeting. The books would have to be put away. So would all the dishes and the pots and pans. Why not take advantage of the opportunity to get rid of the piles of old newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and newsletters? The bookcases would have to be dismantled, and that would mean enlisting Uri's help. Is it tonight he's coming back? Or tomorrow? Or the day after? And then Nina could deliver