The Golden Rule
The golden rule dictates that one should always treat others as they would others treat themselves. The philosophy which the narrator has committed to preaching is phrased slightly differently but amounts to the same thing: “The chief thing is to love others like yourself.” This governing existential mandate becomes the symbolic expression of how to recreate the paradise on the alternative earth right here on the one where things fell apart.
The Little Girl
The little girl in damp, tattered clothing desperately looking for help from an adult whom the narrator runs off with a stomping of his foot is the symbolic manifestation of the consequences of what happens when one does not put the Golden Rule into effect. At the time of the confrontation, the narrator is intent on suicide and does not see her as mattering to his life. But later she will not only come to matter, she will become the mechanism that saves his life by keeping him from killing himself.
Earth II
The other earth existing in a parallel dimension of the universe to which the narrator is taken in his dream exists on the other side of the galaxy. It is earth still in a state of perfection existing because there was no fall from grace in the garden of Eden. Although situated within the dream reality as a separate entity, it is clearly intended to be interpreted merely as a symbolic representation of our earth as it might have been had things not gone wrong between a serpent, a woman and a man.
The Germ
In visiting this paradise on an alternative version of earth, the narrator eventually becomes the symbolic serpent who brought about the fall. He is not situated as the serpent, but rather as an infectious germ bringing on a plague. By the time his visit ends, paradise on the other earth has been lost and it has devolved into a mirror of the dimension to which he returns. No explanation is given as to why his presence brings about this set of circumstances, but the implication is that humanity as it exists cannot help but bring about devastation wherever it goes.
Science
Science, it may surprise some modern readers but clearly not all, becomes the singular symbolic entity of wickedness capable of bringing about a collapse to paradise. Science in this meaning is really more synonymous with knowledge as is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Science not mean knowing the names of the plants or learning history, but economics and sociology and ideology and linguistics and the law. As the narrator recalls the inhabitants of the other earth saying following their own fall from grace: “Science will give us wisdom, wisdom will reveal the laws and the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness.” For the narrator, the exact opposite is true.
