Section 4 (pages 58-71) Summary

This section begins with John passing on a story told to him by his grandfather about the citizens of a town whose clumsy, and increasingly foolish, attempts to build an underground tunnel between the stables and the store merely ended up with a sunken pathway through the town, formed as the tunnel collapsed. As the story goes, the entire town ended up being moved so the people who lived there could avoid the embarrassment of being asked how the pathway got there, and with the pathway turning into a small creek, beside which visitors would, and could, picnic happily.

This leads into a brief commentary on how, at the time of writing, John's son and Tobias are running through the lawn sprinkler, which provokes John to comment on how much beauty, transcendence and joy can be triggered by the...