Book VIII is the most religious of all the books inside the Life of Pilgrim . Pilgrim meanders around in his old age thinking about his society, his son, his yard, and his species. Dreams torment him, and his ultimate dissolution raises its ugly head. His attention span is not “what it was”, but he’s shrugged off anger his political and societal battles are not further addressed. Instead, he sits with his feet up inside his backyard and dreams about “It”. Then he rises alongside “It” to look over the Los Angeles region as a honey bee. The old man gets depressed again and dreams he’s on the bridge of the Titanic watching all his cells “abandon ship”. He recovers from that: goes to the Dental Clinic, gripes about “Building and Safety”, and wanders around his community’s dowdy and disused mall. He worries about his neighborhood children, and it brings up memories of tiny Pilgrim’s Halloweens in the 1950’s, and scenes from Disney’s Pinocchio . This leads to how culture is transmitted, and how our simplest actions, attitudes and ways of thinking persist inside our descendants. The cat dies, and he’s driven back to his own mortality . He dreams of rising as a mist from his own eye sockets! This leads questions about the human soul and to Keats’ nightingale poem. From there: to Dante, Milton, William Blake and Dore’s “heaven”. He’s comforted by that and even imagines himself inside that Dore etching of upwardly spiraling human souls. To balance this Christian concept, he imagines himself “Coyote” in a Maidu sense: rescued one more time by his “old woman” who retrieves him from the ashes of his funeral fire. From there: onto a new race of tattooed geisha women and the female race in general. This reminds him of the necessity of building a new roundhouse and starting a fire at the center for a new ceremony: rite of passage for a set of modern human teenagers. He puzzles out how to describe our collective consciousness and how we merge with it. Then he imagines traveling in both directions on the 4th dimensional “time axis” of our cosmos, to peer down upon himself one afternoon in Book I as a young boy in La Crescenta, looking through bags of pennies behind the bank. Finally: old Pilgrim returns to women again: myriads and myriads of them in the middle of daily routines. He remembers his first geisha: “Masaye”, and imagines that he returns with her to Berkeley, to relive an LSD overdose they shared in San Francisco, at the Hunters Point Art Museum. After that: he wonders about the vastness of that cosmos and the fact that life’s building blocks are assembled from fewer than 70 actively combining chemical elements, and how the chemical soup we rise from is being repeated with these same 70 element variations inside trillions of galaxies, their stars’ and their planetary systems. It’s possible that another five year old Pilgrim wakes up from sleep inside another human race with the same genetics and similar thoughts: somewhere else inside the boundaries of our universe.