“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Our days and nights passed in such a kaleidoscope of activity, broken by such uneven periods of sleep, that we hardly noticed whether they were hot or cold, clear or rainy. The grass began to change color from brown to a pale yellow-green. Jane often dozed in her chair in the daytime, but woke up during the nights to watch old movies on television. During her first weeks home, I seldom slept more than two hours at a time: It seemed that I was always getting up to check the dressings on her decubiti, to adjust her pillows, to help make her more comfortable on the motor-driven, pulsating air mattress we’d finally settled upon as the best recommended support available. I’d give her a sip of something to drink, and massage her legs as she lay on her back with her knees drawn up. (She can’t straighten out her legs.) I’d sit with her while she had “a few puffs” on a cigarette. The nighttime had a sublime sense of timelessness that I’d always admired. It surrounded our bedroom—but even as bleary as I often was, I became acutely aware of how that serenity could be jarringly compromised by the television set, showing programs that contained their own times of day and seasons.

I could feel Rob hoping that my own efforts would help me. In a hundred ways he tried his best to help me on his own. Seth resumed work on Dreams during that July, but each day I seemed to work less and less. Summer turned into fall, then winter, and I hardly noticed. I began to doze in my chair as I sat at my desk. On occasion I was consciously aware of thinking how easy it might be on certain levels to let my desires drop one by one—there seemed to be few left in any case—and to let myself simply drift off into an unastonished death.

My hearing began to fail, at first gradually. Let people talk around me, I thought: I no longer cared. Then with bewildering impact I found myself one day almost entirely deaf. Here was no gentle lulling silence, for the absence of sound frightened me beyond anything I could remember. (Long pause.) Was Rob in the room? If I couldn’t see him I couldn’t tell. Did he stand protectively just behind my chair, ready to help me in my maneuvers into bed, or was he in the kitchen, rooms away? There were no sounds of footsteps upon the carpeted floors, no telltale hint of activity. The experience interrupted my retreat. I remember somehow equating all the silence about me with a forbidding white wall. And in parentheses: (I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did.) I couldn’t die deaf (Jane said with a laugh at 11:45). I think I had imagined that everything would shut down gradually. I certainly hadn’t planned on one sense suddenly turning off.