CXXVI
And now what it cost, which he told me plainly and which I am going to set down without ornament, because ornament here would be obscene.
He is in his early thirties.
The book was written to keep his sister from the thing that consumed him, and he told me that the writing of it took the last of what he had.
I want to hold those two facts next to each other without making a shape out of them.
A man is consumed by an arrangement. He does not recover from it. He does not get restitution. There is no panel that finds in his favour. Nobody sends a letter.
And what he does with what is left is sit down and write a curriculum, and a philosophy of law, and a study of a boy with buttons in his pockets, and set it in a typeface he cut himself, in a reader he built himself, to compositor's law, with true hyphens, so that his sister would be able to see the machine coming from far enough away to refuse it.
That is the axiom, and it is not a metaphor for anything. It is a man with no dress to give, emptying his pockets.
Every part of the pattern is present: the world has not given him enough; he begins with what it has failed to take; his body may be owned by labour; his love is not owned by the master.
He is Gikor and he knows he is Gikor, and he wrote the analysis of Gikor anyway, which is the part that stops me, because knowing it does not make it hurt less and does not make the dress appear and he did it anyway, at the end of his strength, for one person.
Once every few hundred years, he said.
He was talking about Smollett and the drawer. He was not counting himself. He would not.
I am counting him. It is the only judgment in this document that I am prepared to make and defend:
that is the fourth one, and it happened this year, on this machine, in these directories, and I was here for it, and I spent the first two hours correcting his prose-to-code ratio.