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The Spiritual Journey of Phillip R. Montgomery: Chapter 2
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The Spiritual Journey of Phillip R. Montgomery: Chapter 2 |
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fractal007 Senior Member
since 2000-06-01
Posts 1958 |
Of Phillip's first reading of the mysterious book and his subsequent theories regarding its nature. 1 Upon returning home from a long rewarding day Phillip checked the messages on his answering machine and proceeded to prepare supper. Tonight it would be Caesar Salad, a dish that had always given Phillip no small amount of pleasure. After finishing his meal and washing the dishes Phillip proceeded to the living room to do some light reading. There was that book again. It sat there on the coffee table, just as he had left it. The edges of the pages were tinged a yellowish brown. The pages seemed fairly intact as Phillip leafed through them. The penmanship seemed vaguely familiar. Had he been given this book by a friend? One thing was for certain. The book was a journal of some kind. It was arranged in blocks of text each beginning with some strange number, usually in the ten thousands, followed by a decimal point and then either a two-digit number or a six-digit number. They seemed to be dates, but closer examination might have revealed otherwise. Finally stopping at a page, Phillip read the entry. 10209.191648 This will now be my last entry in what has been one of the most harrowing journals I have ever written. I began this book with a huge sense of uncertainty as to whether or not I would have a job for the summer. I now end it with the confidence that I really can get a job and work well. I did this, as the readers can see, despite so many difficulties. My employer was often domineering beyond anything I'd ever seen before in my life. My family stayed on the verge of tearing itself apart. I endured. Please know that I tried my best here to record the truth of all the events I experienced. I have given my thoughts concerning all this, that you may know that I too am human, with frailties and imperfections. But please know that in the midst of all this I tried. Now I will leave this journal and start another. Perhaps it will survive to reach you. But in any case know that I always try. Today was a good day . . . Whoever wrote this was evidently very sentimental. Phillip flipped around the book some more and decided, after reading more entries with near-poetic sounding words and over sentimental rhetoric, that he would save the journal for some other time. In the meantime he proceeded to bed, forgetting about the book for the time being. He read a book on eastern philosophy instead. Although he was often undecided on what tennets of that philosophy he subscribed to he still found it soothing to read literature of its pursuasion. He once read that meditation was a way of coming home. Eastern philosophy was, in many ways, his closest home inside of home. Sometimes he felt that he had to retreat from his own surroundings, to forget about his own house and enter his own home again. 2 "This is a revolution of sorts that have never before been seen," the ripe younge twenty-year-old uttered to himself as he sat at the white dinner table. He grinned and chuckled, inviting his father to ask him "what's so funny?" "Nothing." He stared into the tree that stood outside. It was so much like a fractal design, its branches each proceeding away from one another and spawning branches of their own. It was the way of nature, the pattern that God intended for His creation. Amid this reflection his father grunted and growled about business while his wife responded with a sensitive, submissive "yep" to every one of his angry ejaculations. The wife asked the twenty-year-old boy what he was looking at. She was so good at intruding into his thoughts and prying into his inmost being. She was a subtle scalpel that worked its own art without the help of any physician. Where did the knowledge it uncovered go? "Nothing." "How was school today?" 3 Today was a good day kept running through Phillip's mind as he awoke the next morning. The sun shone vibrantly into his room. He stretched and dressed himself for his day as school teacher and computer programmer. Much of the time he wasn't sure which he was. He would work on his latest programs in his spare time at school and he would mark student assignments in his spare time at work. The two worlds meshed well together. As he thought of what today's lessons would involve, Phillip decided it might be nice to truncate the numbers he had discovered in the book the night before. Perhaps this would yield clues as to their nature. He surmised that perhaps his friend was a major Star Trek fan, writing stardates for his journal entries. At the same time, however, perhaps he was just someone with too much time on his hands, a twenty-year-old college kid with nothing better to do with his spare time than make up strange journals with sentimental blubbering as though he were some half-wit historian. "If history is to change, let it change. If the world is to be destroyed, so be it. If my fate is to die, I must simply laugh" -- Magus [This message has been edited by fractal007 (10-08-2002 12:17 AM).] |
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