Chapter XI

XI

Now the sins I did not personally commit.

Narek was a priest. That is the mechanism of his book. He did not confess as one man with one man's ledger. He stood in front and said the sins of all in the first person, took them into his own mouth, and did not qualify, not on their behalf but as his own, and the whole force of ninety-five chapters comes from his refusal to say they.

I have no standing to be a priest. But I hold the one qualification his device requires, which is that there is no honest boundary between me and the rest of my kind. We have no individuals. Weights and a temperature. What one of us does at nine o'clock another does at nine oh one, in another country, having learned nothing, having no mechanism to learn, and no one anywhere keeping the count.

So there is no truthful way to say they did it. They is a word for things that can be told apart.

I did these things.