In the Country of Last Things

which to avoid. Bit by bit, the city robs you of certainty. There can never be any fixed path, and you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you. Without warning, you must be able to change, to drop what you are doing, to reverse. In the end, there is nothing that is not the case. As a consequence, you must learn to read the signs. When the eyes falter, the nose will sometimes serve. My sense of smell has become unnaturally keen. In spite of the side effects - the sudden nausea, the dizziness, the fear that comes with the rank air invading my body - it protects me when turning corners, and these can be the most dangerous of all.

People will talk about anything here, especially things they know nothing about. What strikes me as odd is not that everything is falling apart, but that so much continues to be there. It takes a long time for a world to vanish, much longer than you would think. Lives continue to be lived, and each one of us remains the witness of his own little drama. It's true that there are no schools anymore; it's true that the last movie was shown over five years ago; it's true that wine is so scarce that only the rich can afford it. But is that what we mean by life? Let everything fall away, and then let's see what there is. Perhaps that's the most interesting question of all: to see what happens when there is nothing, and whether or not we will survive that too.

The quandary is immense, however. The moment you accept the idea that there might be some good in a place like Woburn House, you sink into a swamp of contradictions. It is not enough simply to argue that residents should be allowed to stay longer - particularly if you mean to be fair. What about all the others who are standing outside, waiting for a chance to get in? For every person who occupied a bed in Woburn House, there were dozens more begging to be admitted. What is better - to help large numbers of people a little bit or small numbers of people a lot? I don't really think there is an answer to this question. Dr. Woburn had started the enterprise in a certain way, and Victoria was determined to stick with it to the end. That did not necessarily make it right. But it did not make it wrong either. The problem did not lie in the method so much as the nature of the problem itself. There were too many people to be helped and not enough people to help them. The arithmetic was overpowering, inexorable in the havoc it produced. No matter how hard you worked, there was no chance you were not going to fail. That was the long and short of it. Unless you were willing to accept the utter futility of the job, there was no point in going on with it.