ivalent of standing in a great spired cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystical light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially (147).
Of course, this experience takes place in the midst of the "airborne toxic event," from which Jack is essentially powerless to protect his children or himself. Even without this event, the world is a place of lost innocence, of lost meaning, of lost tenderness. A sleeping child embodies such innocence, meaning and tenderness, especially a sleeping girl who is all the more vulnerable to the corrupting evils of the world.
Jack imagines on some level that as he watches the sleeping children he has some power to protect them, some capacity to experience the innocence and meaning he sees in their sleeping figures. That his power is illusory does not matter. What matters is that he is feeling something which is simultaneously human and divine. For that moment, however brief, however imaginary, he is reconnected to the "spiritual system" whic
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