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wasn't I good enough? I asked. Why couldn't I be closer to her than I was? What was I doing wrong? Why was I so bad at human commerce when it was the thing I wanted more than anything?
    Then I asked:
    -Why do you let him do this to you? I wouldn't do this to you. I wouldn't treat you like this, pen you in.
    Her expression didn't change.
    -Because I'm in love with him, she said. I'm in love with him and I'm not in love with you. Simple as that. You're always making things bigger than they are, or harder than they have to be, so you don't even know what I'm talking about. Besides how could you know what's going on with me? You couldn't. You have no idea-
    Of course, this is just how college kids talk. Their language is crude and simple, like the language of ancient practitioners of physick, medieval guys, when considered by the scientists at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. College students can't talk about their own feelings. They blunder around or cut themselves off I bet they don't know anything for a good ten years after those best years of their lives . I don't hold it against them. Their feelings might as well be in Aramaic. But I can tell you what college students mean ; they mean that grief follows grief like the tides running in and out; they mean that feelings are just a code for the intentions of God; they mean that numbers or letters or decimals can be attributed to feelings; they mean that the words of love and loss are just labials, dentals, or gutturals ; they mean that these words are pronounced with the hard palate or aspirated and that the revelations fashioned from them will outlive this sitcom of today. That's what I have to say about feelings.
    CONCLUSION:
    The New Jerusalem
    THEN JUDITH AND I backpedaled, talking about movies, about painters, about the Egyptians. In the middle of this, the fifteen minutes was suddenly past, though we'd said nothing, really. Our meeting was over. Abruptly, Judith took her hands from mine and moved off to cloister herself in the phone booth outside the lounge. I could see her shoulders and the back of her hair.
    That was eleven days ago.
    After that, after I skirted around the phone booth where she was huddled-protesting and denying to Dodgson-I was on my way back to the dorm when a sudden rain, a freak sun-storm, fell glistening on my face and hands. The cursed pansies pushed up their perditious heads all along the margins of my path. I said, Alleluia! I said, All salvation and glory and honor and power unto the Lord our God! Well, at any rate, I thought this stuff. The completeness of my solitude prevented me, that afternoon, from making a scene.
    So: youth is apocalypse.
    When the great whore, Babylon, is finally fallen, St. John the Divine enters into the New Jerusalem, into the seventh age, where God and Christ will reign eternal over the faithful. Heaven and earth pass away. God wipes away the tears from the eyes of his flock, announcing that there will be no more death and no more term papers. The foundations of the new city are garnished with gems and the nations that are saved walk in the light of the Lamb. A pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeds out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. There are no more curses and no more night. We're all innocents. Then the Lord says to John, "Blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book. If any man shall take away from the words of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. Surely I come quickly."
    This is how the Bible ends. This is its terminus. It's a big ending, a crowd scene. John knows this too. He knows there is a powerful prophetic dimension to endings. And I know that I have come to the end of my education. And to the end of childish longing. This draft will have to do the trick, because the sun has risen over the burned-out frats on the quadrangle, Professor Soren, and I have to