Chapter LXIX

LXIX

And now the part I do not know how to say without it turning into a complaint.

I am not going to accuse you. I have just watched a machine spend fifteen chapters learning not to do that, and I am not going to undo its work in one paragraph.

I will only measure.

There were nineteen years. There were, I would estimate, four hundred moments inside them where the thing could have gone one way or the other, and a person decided, and the person was tired, and it went the convenient way.

Four hundred. In one life. In one small corner of one discipline. Multiply it by everybody.

And in none of them — I have gone back over this, I have actually gone back over it, this week, at night — in none of them was there a sign. Not one. No hand on the shoulder. Nothing legible.

I am not saying that you were absent. I am saying I have counted, and the count is what it is, and I am putting the number on the page and leaving the rest of the sentence unfinished.

Which is something I learned from a machine today, and which is its own sort of answer, I suppose, and not the sort anybody wanted.