3 ideas
The Town has no conflict, fear or grief because each resident's shadow, the carrier of mind and memory, is cut off at the gate and left to die. The residue of mind that remains is drawn off by the unicorns, which then die in the winter cold. The mechanism is that perfect tranquility is only possible by removing the faculty that suffers and loading its remainder onto a scapegoat, which also removes love, desire and selfhood.
The scientist explains that as the narrator's consciousness closes, subjective time can be split without limit, like Zeno's arrow that never reaches its target. The final instant is therefore experienced as endless life inside the mind's own constructed world. On this account, immortality does not come from extending physical time but from time dissolving within a closed consciousness.
At the end, the narrator's shadow finds an escape route through the pool back to the ordinary world and urges him to flee. The narrator stays and goes into the Woods, the place for those who kept remnants of their minds. His reason is that he created the Town and owes it and its people his responsibility. The claim is that a person cannot simply escape the interior world they built, and must live inside its consequences.