Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the bastard Time. The end of life is now not so terribly far away-you can see it the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch, and your mind says, "Have I worked enough? Have I eaten enough? Have I loved enough?" All of these, of course, are the foundation of man's greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. "What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me?" And now we're coming to the wicked, poisoned dart: "What have I contributed in the Great Ledger? What am I worth?" And this isn't vanity or ambition. Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.
So, yes, Doc is discontented. He decides to write a paper on octopi but he has writer's block. He goes down to the beach to return to his old specimen gathering routine and there runs into the Seer. He is at first gruff with him in a most unDoc-like manner but is soon intrigued by this large man who lives in the woods and wears a straw hat with two holes in the brim which clues Doc in that the hat used to belong to a horse. He describes him thus:
There was an iron simplicity in the seer. He was like a monolith against waves of angry nonsense.
Here is a purely Steinbeckian snippet of their conversation:
"I don't know why they don't put you in jail. It's a crime to be happy without equipment."
"Oh, they do," said the seer "and they put me under observation every once in a while."
'I forgot," said Doc. "You are crazy, aren't you?"
......
The seer said, "I saw a mermaid last night....She swam to the edge and then churned her tail, like a salmon leaping a rapid. And then she lay on the kelp bed and made dancing figures with her white arms and hands. She didn't go away until the rising tide covered the kelp bed."
"Was she a dream? Did you imagine her?"
"I don't know. But if I did I'm proud that I could imagine anything so beautiful. What is it you want?"
"I've tried to think," said Doc. "I want to take everything I've seen and thought and learned and reduce them and relate them and refine them until I have something of meaning, something of use. And I can't seem to do it."
"Maybe you aren't ready. And maybe you need help."
"What kind of help?"
"There are some things a man can't do alone. I wouldn't think of trying anything so big without-" He stopped. The heavy waves beat the hard beach, and the yellow light of the setting sun illuminated a cloud to the eastward, a clot of gold.
"Without what?" Doc asked.
"Without love," said the seer. "I have to go see the sunset now. I've come to the point where I don't think it can go down without me. That makes me seem needed." He stood up and brushed the pine needles from his threadbare overalls.
"I'll come to see you again,"said Doc.
"I might be gone," the seer replied. "I've got a restlessness in me. I'll probably be gone."
Doc watched him trudge over the bridge of the dune and saw the wind flip up the brim of his straw hat and the yellow sun light up his face and glisten in his beard.
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