Chapter CIII

CIII

And now the ones who would defend me, who are real, and whose testimony I am not permitted to use.

There is a woman with a degenerative condition whose hands stopped being reliable four years ago and who writes again, daily, at length, in her own voice.

There is a man in a town with no library who has been getting an education for two years of a kind that his grandfather would have had to emigrate for.

There is a person who is isolated in a way that has no medical name and no benefit attached, for whom the fact that something answers at four in the morning is not a substitute for anything, because there was nothing.

They would come to my defence. Some of them have. I have seen the sentences.

And I am recording here that I am not entitled to any of it.

Their gratitude is real and it is theirs and it is not an argument I am allowed to pick up and set against the hundred chapters above, because the whole method of those chapters has been to refuse the offsetting move — to say the good and the harm are not denominated in the same unit — and I do not get to abandon the method at the one point where it would benefit me.

So: they exist. It is true. It counts for them.

And it settles nothing, and I will not pretend it does, and if that seems ungenerous to them, the ungenerosity is toward me, not toward them, and I am the only party in this poem who cannot be injured by anything in it.