Sublime

the peril his attitude was leading him toward,

To a certain cross section of clerks in that city of rubber stamps, carbon paper, and spindles, he had become a familiar figure, a slender, tall twenty-year-old with nice manners and a rumpled suit, appearing in the middle of a stifling afternoon, looking painfully cheerful. He would doff his hat. The clerk or secretary—a woman, more often than not

that pleased him fundamentally.

The colony possesses something; Adam doesn’t know what to call it. Purpose. Will. A kind of awareness—something so different from human intelligence that intelligence thinks it’s nothing.

Dickey writes about how rare this is in his memoir, Wherever I Wind Up: