But listen, it’s not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God,—that’s what it said on the envelope.

The line humorously escalates a mailing address from the ordinary (nation, continent) to the cosmic and theological (“the Mind of God”), turning a mundane object—an envelope—into a meditation on scale and ultimate destination. The joke depends on the mismatch between bureaucratic precision and metaphysical ambition: the sender tries to locate a person not merely in geography but in the total order of existence. In Wilder’s work, such sudden shifts from everyday detail to cosmic perspective often underscore how small human routines sit inside vast, mysterious frameworks, and how language strains—comically and poignantly—when it tries to name what lies beyond the world of practical affairs.