The Hill Was The World or What Is Other

         There was a man who lived on top of a very tall hill, and, every morning, stepped to the very edge of it and looked down. The hill was so high that, when he looked down, after a ways he could make out no more, and thus he naturally concluded that his hill was the extent of the world. He had never been any place other than the top of his hill and so, as far as he knew, there was no other place for him to be. He stepped to the edge of the hill each morning and dropped a rock down, and he listened to the sound of it striking against trees, against the craggy face of the hill, until it was lost to sight and sound. The rock, he reasoned, has gone to the edge of the world, and beyond.
         Being a man with a vivid imagination he had some idea of "other", though he had nothing in particular to define it with. His thought process for the justification of its existence went something along these lines:
         A thrown rock does not cease to exist.
         A thrown rock travels from one place to another.
         I threw that rock.
         It did not cease to exist, and it went somewhere.
         Frequently, he experienced the overwhelming desire to know where the rock traveled to, but as he had no feasible method of knowing where that was or how to get there, he satisfied himself with enmeshing himself in an interior world startling in its vividness. More than any solid pictures of it, though, what he possessed about "other" was an overwhelming perception of...he had no word for it, he supposed, but it was very similar to what happened when he glanced straight at the sun on a particularly brilliant day and refused, for whatever perverse, stubborn reason, to look away. When he looked at that inside himself, he was looking at the image of a sun he carried around. For that is what it was: "other" was a sun that he carried around in his breast.
         One night, he had a dream. He saw himself as he was-- at least, as he was when he looked into the creek just behind his house, for that was the only way he had of knowing what he looked like-- and, as he watched that distorted, quivering, creek-man, he stepped over the edge and disappeared. Night after night he watched himself, and night after night he thought, Look! That is me, and I must be going to where the rock has gone! But, surely there is an easier way to get there? but because of the steep drop, he could not see that any other way. Morning after morning, he wandered again, and threw another rock.
         It came about during that autumn, as the birds that came from beyond the hill and flew again beyond it, that as he was taking his walk to the edge, one of them flitted up to him. That bold little creature went so far as to perch on his shoulder. He reached up to feel the soft warmth of it beneath his hands, but as he did something dropped from the bird's beak and tumbled into the wild grass at his feet. The bird flew off then, and soon it was nothing but the memory of a song, and he watched it leave until there was nothing where his gaze was focused but blueness. Then, he reached down at his feet.
         It was a rock.
         There are, if you have not noticed, plenty of "rocks" mentioned in this story, and they seem to be all getting thrown or dropped in some fashion or another, so perhaps the importance of this one should be elaborated.
         He knew this rock, the way we might know something memorable that has passed our own vision. Most things that you see are, for all practical intents and purposes, forgotten; they go to dwell in those shadowy, subconscious reasons, and they stay there as we seldom have a purpose to recall them. There are other things that we think about so often and that are so queer that we have no choice but to remember them. It seems as though the world has obligated us to remember them, and there is no escaping that obligation.
         He knew this rock because he had thrown it.
         It was a queer rock, parts of it rough and others smooth, and it possessed a queer quality. It was cold beneath his touch, and it fit inside his palm with the same familiarity as his own hand would have. He had thrown this rock, and yet here it was, brought to him by a bird.
         Here, then, was the world, whispering quietly under guise of birdsong, There is other.
         It haunted and haunted him so until the first day of winter, with the world cold and blue around him, and his hands cold and blue folded beneath his arms that he crossed over his chest, tight as they would wrap. He found himself on the edge of the hill, and there was so little room between him and the drop-off that it seemed the slightest wind would pick him up and carry him down. He thought he heard, somewhere off in the blue-- though it was not possible, it could not be possible-- the faint, sweet twittering of a bird. With that sound in his ears, and the thought of the sun in his chest, he stepped.