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The death notebooks were laid in state between sheaves of accounts in the studio’s corner—and they were blessed by long tongues of light that slipped between the slats of the window-blind, to change their general hue. From night to day, from night to day, the death notebooks lay in state, at once mouldering, and accruing the gifts of a shut room; sources engendered by time’s advance settled in the paper’s weave. A continual torque was applied to the words. Each passing day registered in the death notebooks, the accumulating years were added; years that, having acted outside, crept into the room through its cracks and took shapes between the lines, talking in turn as they multiplied, their slated successors close behind. Discovered, distributed, carried now to a grove and now to a bench and now on a galloping train, they speak when read of the crying of their author, taking in their design her teary smears—the coughing out of half-capsuled words caught in their very breaking. The reader of the death notebooks at once knows dying, and his cells, her cells, fall out of jamb. Each cell indicates—the author’s evidence—seconded by each intervening year—“We will not press on,” they indicate. The reader may stop to consider, forced to consider assent.