The Boundless Sublime Read Online Free PDF

last.
    Her name was Lib, and she seemed to be the matriarch of the house. She introduced me to the others. I shook hands with a brown-skinned, good-looking man in his thirties called Welling, and received another hug from Stan, a wiry old guy with white hair in a long ponytail. Maggie was short and Asian – she was in her early twenties, and the way she grinned at me immediately reminded me of Minah. The last was Val, a giant, pale man with a scarred face, who ducked his head when Lib said his name and didn’t make eye contact with me.
    Stan winked at me. ‘Ruby, we were discussing the relationship between the mind and the body, yeah?’
    I looked to Fox for help.
    Fox tilted his head. ‘Well,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The mind has no physical form. You can’t see it, or weigh it, or measure it with a ruler. So what is it? How does it interact with the physical world?’
    ‘Ahah! There is no physical world,’ said Stan, pointing at Fox with his kitchen knife. ‘Everything we experience is a fabrication of the mind. Who says the things I see and feel and taste are the same things that you see and feel and taste?’
    ‘Of course there’s a physical world,’ said Maggie, rolling her eyes. ‘It’s pretty arrogant to assume that everything exists only for you. That if you stopped breathing, the whole world would just puff out of existence.’
    ‘If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it,’ I heard myself say, ‘does it make a sound?’
    I felt my cheeks burn red. What a stupid thing to say. The biggest philosophical cliché in the book.
    ‘Ruby,’ said Fox, frowning, ‘that’s an amazing question.’ His face broke into a proud grin as he turned to the others. ‘Isn’t it?’
    He’d never heard it before. The others nodded and smiled, a little indulgently. The question obviously wasn’t new to them, so they weren’t all as sheltered as Fox. I looked around at each face. It didn’t seem like any of them were related. A little piece of the Fox puzzle clicked into place. It was a commune. Fox lived in a commune. One of those hippy places where everyone meditated and the kids were home-schooled. That explained a lot. I wondered if they were some sort of New-Age Christians.
    The conversation flowed on to other topics, and I kept my mouth shut, afraid of embarrassing myself further. Lib handed me a knife to chop up celery. Fox was sent to set the table, and I listened as the others debated big ideas. Stan was talking about atoms and particles and how they behaved in predictable ways.
    ‘They follow rules,’ he said. ‘They’re probabilistic.’
    ‘So?’ asked Maggie.
    ‘So if we’re made up of atoms, and atoms obey the rules of nature, can we really be said to have free will?
    Welling chuckled. ‘People are more than atoms and particles.’
    ‘Are they?’ replied Stan. ‘What else is there?’
    And they all laughed, as if Stan had said something hilarious. I smiled – the laughter was contagious. But I had no idea what had been so funny.
    Fox came back in, his eyes going straight to me, his brows quirking a little to check that I was okay. I smiled at him and gave a little nod. I saw Lib’s eyes dart from Fox to me and back to Fox.
    ‘Dinnertime!’ she said, a little too brightly, and I wondered what she thought of me. Did she think I wasn’t good enough for Fox? She was probably right. Nobody was good enough for Fox.

    We filed into the dining room and gathered around a large wooden table. Candles twinkled over an iron fireplace, and the room was warm and cheerful. Bowls and platters of vegetables were placed on the table, and Lib gestured for me to take a seat.
    Fox walked around the table with a large jug, pouring water into everyone’s glass. The water looked slightly cloudy. When he got to me, he paused and glanced over at Lib.
    ‘Bottled water for Ruby, I think,’ she said.
    Fox nodded, put the jug down and left the room, returning with one of the plastic