The Ships of Earth page 125
So Volemak envied the people in the building, and remem-bered having been one of them, or having tried at least to be one of them—was anyone every really a true part of this tran-sient community of pleasure, which evaporated and re-formed itself over and over again in a single night, and a thousand times in a week? It never quite existed, this family of frolickers, it only seemed about to exist, always on the verge of becoming real, and then it retreated always just out of reach.
But here at this tree, Volemak realized, here is the real thing. Here with the taste of this fruit in our mouths, we are part of something that isn't just illusion. We're part of life, wives and husbands, parents and children, the vast onward passage of genes and dreams, bodies and memories, generation after gen-eration, time without end. We are making something that will outlast us, that's what this fruit is, that's what life is, and what they have across the river, their mad pursuit of every sensation their bodies can experience, their frantic avoidance of anything painful or difficult, it all misses the point of being alive in the first place. Nothing that is new is ever new twice. While things that are true are still true the next time; truer, in fact, because they have been tested, they have been tasted, and they are always ripe, always ready...
Yet Volemak could explain none of this to the people gath-ered around him, because he knew that these feelings were his own. Not really part of the dream itself, but rather his own responses to the dream, and perhaps not even what the dream was supposed to mean.
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