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One could find in this humt and this frantic assembling of signs an exercise in the abandonment of intelligence. But I see it as having a poetic function—the same one that is at work in literature, religion, amd paranoia.

The structure reminds me strongly of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive.

And so it came about that, like many other well-meaning people, they worried not so much about the dreadful things themselves as about their own inability to worry about them.

then bone-coloured meat of the apple, / the pear’s soft ass, / a cucumber, veined and clean-scented, / dapple green, fever-cool, / and inside a moon lactating / small teeth of pure light / that the bowels of men will digest / though they have not, yet

In reality, Maria was sent home, where she died. Elizabeth died shortly after. But in my version of the story there’s a scene at the school, where Maria and Elizabeth are both ill at the same time. Stories are more compressed than real life.

Women must so often listen to men with just this expression on their faces, but Mrs. Foresight was feminine enough to feel it was a little hard that so much concentration should be called for when talking to a member of her own sex.

The subject of Miss Clovis’s quarrel with the President was known only to a privileged few and even those knew no more than that it had something to do with the making of tea. Not that the making of tea can ever really be regarded as a petty or trivial matter, and Miss Clovis did seem to have been seriously at fault.

Mrs. hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.