You just lose it in the end. He attempts to read philosophy because he thinks his daughter Judy, who has gone to Murray State, is studying philosophy, but she is taking physics. In the final analysis, however, Mack increasingly withdraws, sending Mary Lou to buy his building supplies and becoming obsessed with calling the weather number on the phone. At the same time, a recording about the weather represents a small degree of certainty that he can find nowhere else. When she finally realizes how she has always felt about him, she tries ineffectually to leave him.
People feel fragmented.
They are in one culture but part of another. Nancy Culpepper, the most educated of all Mason's women, is the assistant principal of a small private school in Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband, Jack, a free lance photographer, and her son, Robert. While Nancy is truly a modern woman, she is very committed, not to holding onto the past, as Jack sometimes accuses her of being, but to understanding its relationship to her. I was standing there looking into the past and the future at the same time . . . Sandra is completely in tune with herself and with nature around her, so much so that she is willing, she says, to offer her ducks as a sacrifice to nature.