Ripeness is All

Chapter 3: THE END

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About This Book

The story follows a man living in a highly automated future where meals, travel, sexual services, and even sleep are provided by androids and responsive machines. Despite continual sensory gratification and social systems that manage reproduction and upbringing, he experiences a persistent, hard-to-name dissatisfaction and fragmented memory. Small disturbances, intrusive dreams, and a growing awareness of mediated intimacy prompt him to question the purpose of his pleasures and the emptiness beneath them. An unprecedented walk through the city opens the narrative toward reflection on alienation, technological substitution for human bonds, and the erosion of personal continuity.

Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all.

And that's true, too, he sighed with old Gloucester. And surely he was ripe now, if he was ever going to be. He was balanced in the midst of his various tendencies, and one-pointed for a great drive, a penetration to the depths. He would know himself truly, as infinitely more than that which comes and goes, and shines but briefly in the darkness.

He stood listening, and gazing into the distance. Yes! The call was clear now, and there would be no further stopping along the way. He strode out strongly, and cut due east, heading for the really high mountains, and the farther shore.