Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [131]
What was it the Dalai Lama said about compassion?
The words are gone, the feeling remains. Did he really use the word oxytocin, did he really say positron emission topography, laughing with the translator as he mangled the phrase? What just happened?
One can always just walk away. The Dalai Lama had said that for sure. Things you don’t like, things you think are wrong, you can always just walk away. You will be happier. Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. But compassion is not just a feeling. You have to act.
HOMELESS NIGHTS IN THE CITY. Slip out the security gate at sunset and off the grid, into the interstices, following the older system of paths and alleys and rail beds that web the urban forest like animal trails. Join the ferals living outdoors, in the wind.
Frank worked from dawn until sunset on weekdays. The rest of the time he wandered the streets and the parks and the cafes. He turned in his van to the Honda place in Arlington, then paid cash to one of the fregans for a VW van with a burnt-out engine, and got Spencer to sign the papers to take ownership of it. He slept in it while he and Spencer and Robin and Robert worked at replacing its engine. It turned out Robin and Robert had VW experience, and they did not mind sitting around in a driveway after a run, fingering over a pile of parts. Apparently this was a recognized form of post-frisbee entertainment.
“The VW engine is the last piece of technology humans could actually understand. You look under the hood of a new car, it’s like whoah.”
“I lived in one of these for three years.”
“I lost my virginity in one of these.”
General laughter. Spencer sang, “I would fight for hippie chicks, I would die for hippie chicks!”
“See if you can get the fan belt slipped over that there now.”
The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment. A man never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going.
If that was true, then all should be well. He should be very high indeed.
Decision was a feeling. In the morning he woke up in the back of the VW van, and saw his Acheulian hand axe up there on the dashboard, and his whole life and identity leaped to him, as solid as that chunk of quartzite. Awake at dawn: now was the time to eat a little breakfast bar, read a little Emerson. So he did. No pressure there, impeding his progress through time; he flowed with perfect equanimity. “To hazard the contradiction—freedom is necessary. If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting.”
And so it did. With a sure hand he opened the door on the day.
He got rid of his cell phone. He stopped using credit cards or checks; he got cash from the ATM in the office and he did all his e-mail there. He kept his FOG phone, but did not use it. He left the system of signs.
Most of his waking hours he was working at the Old Executive Offices. While the VW van was still stationary, when he had an hour, he took the Metro out to Ballston to see Drepung and some of the other Khembalis at their office in the NSF building. Sometimes he walked from there out to the embassy house in Arlington. Once he looked in the garden shed.
When they got the VW van running (it sounded like Laurel and Hardy’s black truck) he also added visits to the farm, to see the gang, and help out in the big garden there. He never stayed long.
At the office he