A day on Oasis lasts three days by Earth’s reckoning. Act One unfolded in daylight. Peter tried to adjust to this new rhythm and stay awake during the day, at times bringing himself to the brink of exhaustion, yet also remaining in a state of peculiar, almost ecstatic enthusiasm, brought on by the novelty of the experience and heightened by his lack of rest. Eventually, Peter collapses unconscious. In Act Two, night falls, but Peter has little time to recover. Difficult things come to surface. They emerge from the past, from the humans and the Oasans; they find their voices. At such moments, people say that the truth is coming out, but that is usually a platitude, and nonsense. Even if our knowledge expands to include new so-called facts, the so-called truth only becomes more complicated. Peter understands certain things better and better, or at least senses them with increasing clarity. He sheds more than one illusion. He also witnesses others painfully shedding theirs. But no one here steps into the clear, liberating light of some sublime truth and lives happily ever after. Each new light merely casts new shadows. There is little point in looking straight into the light: it can only blind you or drive you mad. It is only with the shadow that you can engage “constructively,” as they say—if you can find the strength.

Sometimes, in this story as in life, previously hidden patterns suddenly reveal themselves: the outlines of chains of cause and effect, the half-meanings of events, a powerful intimation that it might be possible to understand what has been and foresee what is to come. At such moments, rationality is rarely the first resource for making sense of these meanings. It seems insufficient; we long for answers beyond or above it. But doing so is a fundamental mistake. The question-and-answer model is the very principle of rationality, its essence and definition. Anything that is to count as an answer to a question requires rationalization. And rationalization is like crystallization: it takes time and energy to enclose a previously elusive substance within an elegant, orderly, transparent structure. It is useful, and its results are valuable—the purer, the more valuable. But placing it at the very top of the hierarchy—believing that absolutely everything can be contained within structures of questions and answers—leads to the conclusion that the world is made of crystals, or is inevitably tending towards that condition. That everything will eventually fall into place and be in order. Yet, to put it mildly, not everything points that way, does it?

One such moment binds together the past and future lives of Peter and Grainger. Suddenly, the relationship between child and parent takes centre stage, as though it were some governing principle of all existence. Grainger knows she will find her father, lost in every possible sense. Peter knows he will find his daughter, who has yet to be born. “What is has already been, and what is to come already is” (Ecclesiastes 3:15). What does that mean? I ask myself this question and feel with increasing clarity that it is an idiot’s question.

The opera is finished.