Notes

idumea/content/005.tex

@@ -76,17 +76,37 @@ She smiled—another blessing!—and nodded to me.
 
 ``We sat in the solarium and spoke about what reading \emph{is.} She spoke of taking a story or a poem and wrapping oneself up in it. She gave me an example. She recited a poem:
 
-\{\{\% verse \%\}\} ``Too many suits move in too many lines. They circle banquet tables, hawk-eyed, hunting crudites, canapés, bruschetta. Fingers ferry food—fish, perhaps—finding slack-jawed mouths already open, squawking at wayward children or bemoaning The Market, whatever that may be.
+\begin{verse}
+``Too many suits move in too many lines.\\
+They circle banquet tables, hawk-eyed,\\
+hunting crudites, canapés, bruschetta.\\
+Fingers ferry food—fish, perhaps—finding\\
+slack-jawed mouths already open,\\
+squawking at wayward children\\
+or bemoaning The Market,\\
+whatever that may be.
 
-``At some point, who cares how long ago, death surfaced, claimed one, submerged again. Who knows how well they knew him, their backs turned, studiously deciding that he is no longer of them?
+``At some point, who cares how long ago,\\
+death surfaced, claimed one, submerged again.\\
+Who knows how well they knew him,\\
+their backs turned, studiously\\
+deciding that he is no longer of them?
 
 ``One could never guess.
 
-``We can say his suit was very fine, perhaps, that the room is tastefully furnished, the casket silver, the bar, open, quite good, and none of them are drunk yet, or at least none look it.
+``We can say his suit was very fine, perhaps,\\
+that the room is tastefully furnished,\\
+the casket silver, the bar, open,\\
+quite good, and none of them are drunk yet,\\
+or at least none look it.
 
-````Good man, good man,'' they mutter, doing all they can to convince each other through well-rehearsed performances, that this must be the case.
+````Good man, good man,'' they mutter,\\
+doing all they can to convince each other\\
+through well-rehearsed performances,\\
+that this must be the case.
 
-``The silently bereaved already sit graveside.'' \{\{\% /verse \%\}\}
+``The silently bereaved already sit graveside.''
+\end{verse}
 
 I turned those words over and over in my head for a minute, since The Woman had seemed quite comfortable sitting in silence with me. She used that time to drink her water while I played back the words again and again, looking down at my paws, and then returned my gaze to hers. ``There is a difference between the mere performance of grief and grieving itself, is there not?''
 
@@ -218,7 +238,7 @@ When it had lived here on Lagrange, though, it had contracted my other up-tree,
 
 And so there on my wall sat a painting that I had asked The Child to make, small by her standards at only the size of both of my paws held flat, wherein she had painted the house, the endless prairie, and the sky that somehow managed to be something beyond endless. There was the gray of the concrete that matched so well the gray-tan stalks of grass in fall, the gray-green stalks in spring, and glass. There was the plain, the sky.
 
-And there, right in the center, hovering a scant claw-width above the house, a perfectly black perfect square.
+And there, right in the center, hovering a scant claw-width above the house, a perfectly black perfect square.\label{motes}
 
 Readers, you must understand that, when I say perfectly black, I do mean it! There is this color, or non-color, \emph{Eigengrau} that is perhaps the darkest you are used to seeing. If you are in a perfectly dark room, or you are out beneath the stars at night and you close your eyes, or you are hiding under two layers of blankets from the monsters that haunt us still, even in this afterlife that we have built up into our nigh-perfection, what you see is not pure black, but \emph{Eigengrau.} It is the darkest color, I am told, that our eyes can see, phys-side! This is because, even when there is no light, the nerves of our eyes still fire occasionally. Perhaps it is because this is something that is required for nerve cells to feel healthy, and when those cells are in our muscles and it is just one or two at a time, it does not yank our hand away from our pen and paper like they were burning hot, but when they are in our eyes, every little firing is still perceived as a photon hitting this rod or that cone. Perhaps it is because there is some fundamental state of being for us that is \emph{not} stillness, but that is movement at some molecular level. Perhaps it is simply because they are lonely! I do not know, I do not know. I do not know.