The end of the newspaper column that Guy Perron finds called "Alma Mater," by "Philoctetes":
"I walk home, thinking of another place, of seemingly long endless summers and the shade of different kinds of trees; and then of winters when the branches of the trees were bare, so bare that, recalling them now, it seems inconceivable to me that i looked at them and did not think of the summer just gone, and the spring soon to come, as illusions; as dreams, never fulfilled, never to be fulfilled."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOrEbznxLRA
Without Guy Perron in the story, we would never have heard Hari's parting thoughts nor his vision of the future, when the people who had shunned him would turn out to need him after all.
Guy: Who was Philoctetes?
Nigel: The great archer...Friend of Hercules. One of the heroes of the Trojan War. Sophocles wrote a play about him, but it's one I never read. They had to set him ashore, abandon him on the way out...
Guy: Why?
Nigel: Hurt in some way. Wounded by one of his own poisoned arrows. Or perhaps he just developed boils and suppurating sores from a vitamin deficiency. Anyway, he stank, and the others couldn't stand the smell. So they set him ashore, and went on.
Guy: Yes. That fitted. Did he ever get to Troy?
Nigel: Eventually. If I remember rightly, they decided they needed him after all. [my emphasis]
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