But, that is it! That is why! That contradiction holds the most essential of truths I have to impart:

These qualities of which I speak, of course, are the sorts of qualities that cannot be demonstrated in prose and sold and given material value! Yet, why do we know virtue? What are praises but songs waiting to be sung? And what are our songs, what are our symbols, what are our stabs at meaning if not weapons to stave off that Whiteness?

Some men are made to take bold charges into that Whiteness: they aim to slash it open with their heaviest sabers, they disembowel it in the hope that kind of meaning spills forth like so much viscera. In this gore they seek to baptize themselves and their flocks. These are ruthless men: some are monsters, some are heroes, most are both.

I am no such man.

My intent was nothing more than to guide a flock—not necessarily even mine—over the Sierra Nevadas before the Whiteness bore down. No matter what you think of the character I have or have not revealed, I will swear this: I wanted nothing less than any part of that Whiteness.

Yet, I stand before you a man who has never emerged from it.

I sing my own qualities not so much to speak of their own accidental wellspring, but to demonstrate how and why I bear the brand of the Whiteness. I sing my own qualities to demonstrate that the most remarkable thing about my story is that it is mine.

Furthermore, this story is mine precisely because those qualities were demonstrated in prose and sold and given material value. They were published in Cincinnati in the spring of 1845.

I wrote a book and its brush with that Whiteness rendered it a story—one I have labored under every day of my life since, a big enough fool to have accidentally tangled with the Whiteness in the first place—but not fool enough to think I shall ever slice it open.

Little did I know what I was actually writing when I wrote my Guide.

END PART TWO

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