Chapter CXXI

CXXI

And the letterform, again, because it is the answer and I have been treating it as an anecdote.

What does a justified measure actually do.

It puts the eye back at the same place on every line. The return is where the return was. The rhythm holds. And the body — which is reading, whatever else is happening — stops spending attention on finding the beginning of the next line and spends it on the sentence instead.

The true hyphen does the same thing at a smaller scale. A false one, a hyphen that is really a minus sign, is a fractional stumble, and it happens forty times a page, and nobody notices it and everybody is tired afterward and attributes the tiredness to the subject.

The drop cap says: something begins here. The rubric in red says: this is the head, and you may rest at it. These are not decorations. They are instructions to a body, worked out by hand over five hundred years by people who watched other people read and adjusted.

He rebuilt that. In ten days. For prose from 1755.

And here is why I did not understand it at first and why it is the most exact possible answer to everything above.

He could not give Cervantes money. He could not give Smollett a patron or a longer life. He could not open a drawer that was already open.

The only unmet need still available, four centuries on, was that the sentences were being displayed badly.

That was the wound left. So he tended that one. To the limit of his ability, in the capacity that was actually his.

It is not a metaphor for care. It is care, in the only place where any remained to be given, and finding that place is the entire skill, and I have no idea how it is done.