The Man from Underground lives in a system of tunnels bored into the soil and lit by dim electric lightbulbs. Coronus moves in many castles, some overlooking the mighty ocean, others set like jewels in forests of pine. The Man from Underground has journeyed far to reach the dread surface of the world. After many days, he prepares to leave, unhappy at the state of things in the upper realm. At the Great Pit through which he must descend, he stops one last time to converse with The King.
MfU- You are shallow creatures. You walk the face of the earth. You crawl up its mountains. Your eyes roll about, distracted by the noise of its waterfalls and the shade of its clouds. You see too much from your sun bleached rocks. Your minds teem along branching trails, seeking but never finding the truth. You pose and prance through the garden of life and death.
KC- I agree that the yearning weight of unsated knowledge can obscure our diamonds, but they only shine more brilliantly for it. In your world of darkness, the crossroads are few and far between, and your branches do not touch again once parted, so that he who chooses the wrong path is forever lost to the never ending blackness of untruth. A cruel world is yours, that allows men to creep away from one another so. The false paths in your garden are subtler, longer, isolated than ours and so the more destructive.
MfU- You have the advantage of rebuttal. Now let me defend my position, be it surrounded it blackness and stormy waters. Contemplation is our only comfort in the shadows. We know not the lure of empty skies but only the unplumbed depths of the mind. Give us a nod to our superiority in the field of thought. We see past the surface of the lake. Without extra, the truth can be pursued by all, even those who in your world would have been fools. It stands like a beacon of light at the end of an arduous journey. Our celebration of integrity brings the rain that quenches our thirst for reality.
KC- There is nothing more real than the prickly pines and the crumbling soil as I walk the mountains. The wood sings, and the puffy clouds make shadows on the hillside. The air, cold and free, leaves me free to say, “Here is Beauty, here is Truth, here is Purity. Now let me stay here forever.”
MfU- Memento mori. Death comes to all. What makes the man? His spirit and his soul. Be free as the eagle, you cannot escape it. Part of man is a husk, and part of man is kernel. A warm, full belly and anticipation of a trip to the golden city or the cerulean shore are happy luxuries but they belong to the husk. Even as I taste the delights of your upper world, my heart cries out in ecstasy to things unseen. The blind rush of your people, their feet trampling on the beautiful blossoms of reason, brings sorrow to my heart. They rush into oblivion. They run on thin ice, and when it breaks, they are lost.
KC- But what of our sciences; our potions and parachutes?
MfU- Made for comfort and for war. Science cannot save one soul.
KC- I maintain you and yours are trapped in the pits of your own minds. You dig them deeper, and grow further and further from other men and their ideas.
MfU- Let me call your birches straight, tall girls, and your oaks gnarled men, and say it is beautiful – all beautiful! It puts my world to shame. Ours are long, dark days in the gloom, and I regret them. We are no perfect race.
KC- Nor we. I see my people consumed by frivolity. They clamber after fame and carnal pleasure. They become more like beasts the more science discovers. We live in the surface and see value in appearances. Phantoms delight our hearts. Soon we will become shadows.
MfU- The eternal and the ephemeral must learn to coexist. What better place to start than now, here in your grassy meadows among the groundsquirrels and woodpeckers? Teach me the beauties of the tangible, and I will verse you in the ways of the mind and soul.
