The victor stood bored, easefully; looking beyond for a comrade who did not come. Saliva wet the chin of the other, whose effort had been great. His hand hung, palm forward, near his knee. “Let’s try again,” he said. “You give me your side where the sun’s not in my eyes. That’s fair.” They exchanged places. The battle went on, the same. Karl was very tired. He leaned back in his bench. In three straight strokes came to his passive eyes sky, river, park. The sky was steadfast and still. The river was dense and still, boats and waves moving upon the river were like the shiver of sun-motes upon a steadfast sky. The park swayed under the stillness of sky and water. Its swaying was a word that came from moveless lips; its swaying was a word issued from moveless lips. Three horizontal strokes in the eyes of Karl, of a world that did not move. Stillness came within him. He turned his head from side to side, as within steadfastness, not stirring it. He saw no more, no less, by turning his head. He was within a focus where all was steadfast and where stillness was all. He moved his hands, and felt how he was wrapped in movelessness. He was not prisoned. He felt free, fluent, felt the accessibility of flight within stillness, within changelessness as within air. He sat upright on his bench and was not tired. He swung his left arm slowly under his face; he felt how the world swung with him so that naught had moved. Upon the cuff of his left sleeve a spot caught him and made him focus his eyes.... A cockroach moved on his cuff. It moved. It moved against the world. It lied. It flowed into the mass of his right hand. It was crushed. It was killed. He said aloud: “I am sorry, life. But I cannot have you around.” He was not surprised at his words. But his words were another stroke, perpendicular to the three-fold stroke of park and river and sky. A stroke cutting along and lifting a veil before his eyes. The movelessness of life won by this fourth stroke of his words another dimension still. So it was that things seemed to happen. Within his immobile vision, he watched things happen ... people move, sun slant farther beneath the green fingers of trees ... as if this fourth stroke of his words saying, “Things happen,” were a knife cutting a cord, unfolding a magic parchment. Men sat upon benches as he sat upon a bench. Men had feet on a pavement as he had feet on a pavement. Men had faces written with thought as he had a written face. All this he saw as if it were happening just now. There was ease in his soul which took each happening and put it away and knew that all was one.