The processes of understanding that he employed were a part of the mechanism of the world. Knowing this did not dissolve loneliness but lent it a strange prescience. All of us alone and ecased in our solitary shells, each riding and being ridden by its system of a self. He sat alone and gazed through the window at the unfamiliar countryside. Bare hills beyond the edge of town, the headlights of trucks coming over the hill that raked the ground with long sweeps of dark, flecked, light.