Pleasure Beyond the Mind
- Arriving home, Dan gives Linda a quick kiss and then high-tails it to the gas station.
- ASAP, Socrates puts his hands on the youth's forehead and he's off on another vision-trip dealy-o. This time he's his infant self, and the vividness of the world stimulates his senses more than it ever did in his adult life. When he awakes at the gas station, Socrates explains that the birth of the mind is the death of the senses.
- The next morning the pair meet at a greenhouse. Socrates has Dan dig the vividness of the plants while listening to his lecture on how mental concepts and names make people feel as if there's nothing new to see.
- The following day Socrates tells Dan how attunement to sensory differences allows people to detect minor imbalances in their bodies, such as toxicity in the kidneys, and take corrective action, such as drinking more water. Keep refining your senses, Socrates advises.
- Dan asks if rich people are happier than poor people. Socrates answers that he is rich, for happiness equals satisfaction divided by desires, and he's cultivated the capacity to want less.
- Socrates suddenly tosses Dan into the air and reminds him that the time was, is, and always will be now, and the place is always here.
- Passersby enter the station and ask what's up with throwing people around. Socrates makes up a story about a trampoline, impressing Dan to no end.
- Walking home, Dan thinks of how he feels a new freedom now that he's ditched his expectation that the world should fulfill him. Socrates shows up out of nowhere, reminds Dan the time is now and the place is here, and tells the youth that nothing can change the past and that the future will never come as one expects.
- The old man touches Dan's temples. He finds himself in a musty, windowless attic, standing alone within a pentacle. Long story short, a bunch of decaying corpses start coming at him, and he feels tempted to leave the pentacle, especially once a beautiful woman falls into the room by the door.
- The Feeling (you know, the one with the capital F) tells Dan to stay within the pentacle, which represents the present moment, rather than go to the monsters (the past) or to the woman by the door (the future). Suddenly the woman begs for help, and drunk with desire (that's what he says!), Dan lunges out of the pentacle for her. She shows blood-red fangs; Dan retreats to the pentacle's safety.
- Back on the sidewalk, Socrates confirms Dan got the point of the melodrama—stay in the safe present—and tells him a story about a priest surprised that another priest chose to carry a beautiful woman across a stream. The less inhibited priest replied that whereas he had already set her down, the questioning priest was still carrying her.
- Point being: let the past go.
- Dan finishes up his university education, occasionally phoning Linda, who has moved away. He finds his exams a breeze since, thanks to his training, he's unobstructed by tension or concern.
- Now graduated, Dan asks Socrates for advice on picking a career. The teacher says it doesn't matter what the youth does, as long as he does it well. As Dan leaves, Socrates touches his student's head and then leaps straight up onto the roof. Dan isn't sure if his long-ago question—how did Socrates get on the roof?—has been answered, since the old man touched his head first. In answer, Socrates only says that there are no well-defined edges for what's real and what isn't.
- The next Saturday, Joy is in town. The three have a wonderful, happy picnic. Dan tells Joy he's retiring from gymnastics, that it's time to move on. She nods without comment.
- For fun, Joy and Dan race. Dan wins. Everything seems romantic. But suddenly Joy states that his path in life isn't wide enough to include her right now, and Socrates has decided Dan is to forget her.
- The teacher touches Dan's head and poof, away go all his memories of Joy.