As with a calm, almost bemused offhandedness the Westerner delivered his remarkable précis, the Old Man found himself overcome with the uncanny sense that he had entered a portal between two worlds. The inscrutibly reserved Occidental scholar who had just given voice to such radical doubt: was he the same man who so often at Sir Toby’s had mediated heated disputes and preserved the old traditions? Here in the comfortable unfamiliarity of the Czech Inn the Old Man sensed that he had been listening to the Westerner’s double, the familiar suave exterior and tranquil mein suddenly released from the even-handed diplomacy and myopic attention to textual minutia by which he had established his centrality to the endless and pointless debates that even now must surely be swirling about the common room at Sir Toby’s, suddenly possessed of a vision of such power and scope that no cloister could contain it and no cabal could control it.

At the same time the Old Man sensed that the Trappist, such a prominent and reliable presence at Sir Toby’s, consistently providing counterpoint to the Westerner’s intramurally controversial discourses, was fading from view. As he watched the Trappist unroll a transparent scroll and mouth inaudible words, he wondered whether the Trappist could still see him sitting there next to him or whether, in that parallel reality, he, the Old Man, was the one who was disappearing.