You lose touch, you lose people. There’s no other way to put it. Friends are never permanent. Over time they replace you with new ones and you do the same until one fine day, you see them walking down the street but it’s been too long, so you turn the other way.
In 1979 Dr. Maya Angelou became my mother. No, she never suckled me at her breast and no, she never cradled me in her arms, but how did she become my lifeline? A literary umbilical cord formed between she and I, and until her recent death, it has never been severed. To be honest, I’m not even sure if death alone could cut the cord that exists between the two of us. Yes, her earthly body has been abandoned for an ancestral form somewhere in the sky, yet, I still feel her warmth, her gentleness and her mothering spirit.
Don’t get me wrong; I had a mother. Two mothers, to be exact, but for what I experienced the summer of ’79, the mothers I had were not prepared to support me in the way I needed. Their words were empty and their capacity to understand my suffering had not matured to a level that made them capable of feeding my starving soul. So, in stepped Dr. Angelou with her memoir I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.
When I tell people Dr. Angelou’s book saved my life, I am not exaggerating. That summer, my innocence was stripped away from me, and no one but Dr. Angelou had the words to express all that I was feeling: “Could I tell her now? The terrible pain assured me that I couldn’t. What he did to me, and what I allowed, must have been very bad if already God let me hurt so much” (I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, 1970). ‘How did she know?’ the eleven-year-old me wondered. How did she know that I, too, felt like a caged bird? How did she know that I couldn’t tell anyone either? And how did she know I, too, felt abandoned by the heavenly God that was supposed to protect sweet little innocent girls like her and me?
Along with reading, writing became my savior too. Seeing the beautiful brown image of Dr. Angelou on the back of her book cover was enough to validate the writer who was bubbling up inside of me. Through writing, I could rewrite the past, the present—even the future. I could create giants with Old Testament fury who annihilated those monsters that stalked the earth for helpless young princesses who bore a striking resemblance to me. I could reverse all of the past atrocities done to the meek long before they had the opportunity to inherit the earth. Reading and absorbing Dr. Angelou’s poetry allowed me to be brave and wise enough to revisit how I viewed myself. One poem in particular that reorganized my image of the self was “Phenomenal Woman” (1978):
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.
There isn’t a woman alive who has ever read those words out loud and didn’t strut around knowing Dr. Angelou wrote those words especially for her. As a result of Dr. Angelou’s bodacity and unapologetic usurping of the mainstream’s idea of what is beautiful, I started writing poetry that showed my appreciation for those parts about me that society deemed unappealing. I wrote poems celebrating my broad nose, my nappy hair and my ample butt. I wrote myself out of bad relationships and unfulfilling jobs. I rewrote society’s reflection of me so that when I looked in the mirror I saw the woman Dr. Angelou wrote about.
Dr. Angelou’s death has left me breathless, but I am finally starting the process of resuscitating myself again through her wonderful and magical words as well as the knowledge that as long as I have a memory of her and her empowering prose and poetry, she will forever remain the rainbow in my clouds.
When I was a child, my mother gave me a remarkable book called The Diary of Helena Morley. The diary is real; it came from a young girl living in a remote mining town in Brazil in the 1890s. Helena is a sharp, studious girl who with a keen ear recounts the gossip of a town filled with hard-up prospectors like her father, dreaming of finding diamonds. We were living in Hawaii then, and as a lonely reader in a rural tropical landscape myself, I loved the antics of this much spunkier girl and liked to play pretend that I wasshe.
I didn’t realize it until much later, but the diary’s translator was the great American mid-century poet Elizabeth Bishop, who moved to Brazil in 1951 and lived there for many years with her lover.
When I was twenty, I first read Bishop’s poetry in a serious way, and it was like entering a room someone had decorated exactly to my liking–that Spartan wood chair just so, that picture slightly catawampus, flowers on the table and the sun entering through the window in the hours I most preferred.
Bishop is said to have left blank spaces in her poems while she waited for the right word to come to her, and that kind of precision, her delicacy of diction, draws me to her work as to a found object, with profound respect and wonder. After all, she only published 101 poems during her lifetime.
I have changed since I first entered that room with those poems, and now, I find Bishop too precious, her rhymes too neat and prudish. But scratch a bit, and you understand the vivid depression underlying that propriety. Bishop’s father died in her infancy, her mother was committed to a mental institution when she was four, and her lover Lota killed herself. Bishop was an alcoholic, and once told Robert Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” I see in her poetry an attempt to bring care and order to the world without ever doing the violence of imposing upon it. “Love should be put into action!” she has a hermit scream in “Chemin de Fer.” Like Bishop, “an echo/ tried and tried to confirm it.”
What use does a journalist have for such a poet—a mediator of such soft and intimate worlds? There is so much ethical as well as aesthetic guidance in Bishop’s work, and I find myself thinking of her lines all the time as I work.
I think of her unwillingness to cede control of her subjectivity in the poem “In the Waiting Room,” and I’m reminded of the violence that portrayal and definition can do. A child reads the National Geographic and has a moment of rough disorientation in recognizing herself in the beings around her: “you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them.” She asks, “Whyshould you be one too? I scarcely dared to look/to see what it was I was.”
When I travel, as I do a great deal, I think of the poem “Questions of Travel,” in which she asks, “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in this strangest of theaters?” Yet she goes, and she watches, and she eyes tiny, light-touched details in those landscapes strange and familiar, like “rain so much like politicians’ speeches,” and “the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages.” These are the products of an ethics given in another poem as “watch it closely,” or, as she once told an interviewer, “I am very object-struck…I have great interest and respect…for what people call ordinary things.”
I will always think of knowledge as cold water, as Bishop says we imagine it to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
And I think of her use of old forms–the ballad, the sestina, simple metaphors–to tell stories of sadness and injustice. Find me a more moving, nuanced portrait of crime and inequality than “The Burglar of Babylon,” which opens with “a fearful stain:/ the poor who come to Rio, / And can’t go home again,” and chronicles a dramatic manhunt for the gangster Micuçú. When at last, a soldier “missed for the last time.” Bishop affords Micuçú the dignity of a complex character and implicates the whole city in the violent death.
That same empathy she extends even to Micuçú envelops the reader. In “The Shampoo,” Bishop ends on a gesture so loaded with humility and tenderness I will forever be grateful for it:
The shooting stars in your black hair in bright formation are flocking where, so straight, so soon? —Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon.
Cora Currier is a reporter with The Intercept who also writes about poetry and books. She has written for The New Inquiry, The Millions, Al Jazeera America, The Nation, and many other publications.
Anyway unpopular opinion probably but the school system (and general book snobbery) fucks up by trying to force kids to read “classics” before they have the mental and emotional development to appreciate them.
This post is me telling you to consider revisiting that classic book you read in the 7th grade that you hated because the ability to understand a lot of literature gets unlocked later, for reasons a lot to do with emotional maturity
I was homeschooled and I didn’t even fully escape this
I read the Iliad in 8th grade (i mean this was in a college-style class I took so not exactly classic homeschooling but still) and hated it. HATED it. PASSIONATELY, violently loathed it. So much so that it’s only now that I’ve been thinking about revisiting it
And like, part of it was just that in the class it wasn’t taught with nuance, but part of it was that I was thirteen years old lol.
It didn’t even occur to me that Achilles could be being portrayed as anything other than a hero, partly because I was stuck in the evangelical Christian sort of schema where all literature either Teaches Important Lessons or is trying to make you sin, and partly because I was 13 and my brain was just black and white like that.
Then last year I read Achilles and Vietnam (amazing book) which actually delved into the context and cultural meaning of a lot of stuff in the Iliad and I realized that it had somehow never dawned on me that the Iliad was a tragedy, that Achilles was supposed to be flawed, that the story depicts (among many other things) the destructiveness of war and how war breaks people.
I hadn’t understood the wrath of Achilles because I hadn’t experienced grief like that. I was constantly frustrated with how all the characters did such senseless and irrational things, because I couldn’t enter their perspective.
And I was bored, because I was 13, and my attention span was like, 15 minutes max, and I just wanted Homer to get on with the story damn it
it’s amazing how unless you read a lot before age 18 you just suck at writing forever and trying to learn to write well just makes you substantially worse
writing by people who haven’t read is often too conversational because the majority of their perception of language has been conversational. writing by people who have then taken classes to learn to write is worse because it allows that conversational form to take on vocabulary and sentence structure that’s totally unnatural in conversation. invariably those things are also misused because you have to see things like little-used highly specific adjectives and adverbs and em dash clauses used a lot before you can use them yourself. i know i sound like i’m ascribing a moral dimension to this and really i’m not, this is just how it shakes out
Asking direct through reblog. What are your sources on this?
it is known to me & others
I can’t tell if this is a joke, but I’m going to treat it seriously:
It’s true that reading is important for writing well, but the part about having to read a lot before 18 is just purest bullshit.
The critical period for language acquisition is real, which is where this post might be getting the idea, but it lasts until like age 12 and applies to learning to speak a language. There’s nothing that happens at age 18 that makes reading affect your understanding of language less. It’s not real.
Like, if it was real, writers would all be stuck writing the way they did when they were 18.
*puts on personal anecdote hat* Also, the benefit that reading confers on your writing is a lot more of a “practice you pursue throughout your life” benefit. It’s most important to keep doing it regularly. A book you read 7 years ago has far less of an effect on your writing than a book you read yesterday.
It is also cumulative. The more books you have read before, the more you will get out of the book you read yesterday. When you revisit a book you read at 16 years later, you will get much, much more out of that book.
I firmly believe that you are young, you literally don’t have the same ability to learn from books you read that you will later in life!
When I was like 14, I read Hemingway and liked it, so I tried to imitate his writing in my own writing, but it didn’t go well because I didn’t fully understand what he was doing with language. I hadn’t read enough. I hadn’t written enough. My brain was still the brain of a 14 year old. The reading you do when you’re young has, if anything, less impact because you straight up don’t have the hardware to actually learn deeply like an adult from it
Also, conversational writing styles are just…fashionable right now, and I want to point out that they’re very much a writing style and pretty artificial because “conversational” styles do not imitate how conversations actually sound or how people actually talk. It’s an incredibly different thing. Good “conversational” writing is actually incredibly hard to do, and writing by people that don’t interact with language much except in “conversational” contexts doesn’t sound conversational at all because so little of “conversational” language skills actually translates to writing
Oh, OP is serious. Okay.
Putting this here because I don’t wanna start another reblog chain:
…
Yes! This is EXACTLY WHY you can learn more from a book you read as an adult than as a child. Every time you read a new book, you are interpreting that book through the lens of your other experiences with language. And then you get to interpret new books through the lens of THAT book!
However, your more immediate experiences with language definitely have a greater effect than a book you read when you were 8. This is why you can re-read a book and learn new things about the craft of writing from it.
Anyway, nothing about this means that you have to read a lot in your “formative years” to be able to write and something happens after that which means you can’t. Rather, you slowly develop the ability to learn from things you read. Reading will, if anything, get MORE impactful as you age.
At 14, my understanding of what made Hemingway a good writer apparently translated to a bunch of run-on sentences. I reread that stuff later and thought “What the actual fuck.”
Starting to read as a kid gets you ahead in the sense that you have…spent more years reading.
However, to even adequately comprehend the finer points of a lot of literature, you have to have a certain level of mental development. I don’t remember exactly what the age is supposedly because my knowledge of this is from my psych class but I think the ability to think abstractly and reason in a complex way doesn’t even fully come online until you’re like. 12 or so.
literature engages your mind on a much more complex level than basic language acquisition. I was a 5th grader who supposedly read on a college level and It straight up does not matter how much you read as a super-advanced 5th grader when you’re trying to write as an adult because your entire perspective on literature has been taken out and put back in upside down.
I also wrote my first novel when I was 12, and i think people have no idea how much real life experience impacts your ability to write. And yes. Talking to real people, hearing them talk, conversation is a very real part of that.
Because I REMEMBER the unique frustration of being barely a teenager and trying to figure out writing books like the ones I read and just…hitting some kind of wall because my personal experience was so limited. You literally NEED to experience life as a mostly-developmentally-mature person to be able to read a dozen good books and synthesize some of what made them good into your own writing.
Don’t leave this in the tags, this is a whole other rant I was trying to hold back BUT
The fact that “books” are seen as some kind of special category of language that has little to do with any of the other Common and Bad categories…is wrong and just a product of our culture.
Oral tradition exists, y'all, and if you call cultures that don’t use writing “pre-literate” I’ll bite you
Like most of it has already been said but even just listening to people talk absolutely can make you a better writer. Find someone outside of your own generation and listen to them tell you a story. Open your mind and let the world in!
There is a difference between Catholic and Protestant attitudes to painting,“ he explained as he worked, "but it is not necessarily as great as you may think. Paintings may serve a spiritual purpose for Catholics, but remember too that Protestants see God everywhere, in everything. By painting everyday things-tables and chairs, bowls and pitchers, soldiers and maids-are they not celebrating God’s creation as well?
- Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring
Johannes Vermeer was the greatest of the Dutch genre painters, who took his subject matter from everyday life. However, Vermeer did not simply record the world around him, but he carefully crafted poetic constructions based on what he observed.
Estimated to have been painted around 1665, Girl with a Pearl Earring is the Dutch artist’s most famous painting.
The painting has become as intriguing in its modest way as the Mona Lisa. Ineed it is often refered to as ‘The Mona Lisa of the North’. The girl’s face turned toward us from centuries ago demands that we ask, who was she? What was the thinking? What was the artist thinking about her?
It is not a portrait but a tronie - the head of an ideal type, it depicts a young beautiful woman in an exotic dress, wearing an oriental turban and an improbably large pearl in her ear. Even though a girl possibly sat and posed for this painting, it displays too few distinctive features - there are no moles, scars or freckles to be seen.
Set against a black background, the young woman features the striking blue and yellow turban and a glistening pearl. Vermeer’s mastery of light and shade can be seen on her luminous skin, while subtle glimmers of white on her parted red lips make them appear moist. Although we don’t know the identity of the girl, she looks familiar, mostly due to the intimacy of her gaze. However, by leaving the corners of her eyes undefined, the artist offers no clue of her emotional state. Her expression is pleasingly ambiguous, contributing to the work being an iconic masterpiece.
I think there are three qualities that make Girl with a Pearl Earring so seductive. It is very beautiful, for one thing. The striking blue and yellow of the girl’s headscarf, set against a black background, the glistening pearl created in a few swift strokes, the expert capturing of light and shade on her luminous skin, the liquid pools of her eyes: all add up to a work of sublime beauty.
But beauty is not enough to sustain the sort of attention Girl with a Pearl Earring receives. I’ve been looking at this painting for over 30 years, and I’m still not bored of it. Why?
Its second seductive characteristic is that the girl looks familiar. We may not know who she is, but we feel we know her because she is looking at us with such intimacy. We mistake this look for familiarity. I’ve had readers tell me that their daughter or their friend or their neighbor resembles the girl. I’ve seen many women online dressed up as her. Someone once told me that I look like the girl, and that must be why I wrote about the painting.
However, we don’t really know what she looks like – not even the basics like hair or eye color. With her face turned partially away, we can’t really discern its shape. The line of her nose blends into her check so we don’t know if it’s wide, snub, or round. Her look is universal rather than specific. In fact, the painting is not actually a portrait of a particular person, but what the Dutch called a tronie – the head of an ideal “type,” like “a soldier” or “a musician” – or, in this case, “a young beauty.”
This leads to the third and most powerful quality of the painting: its mystery. We don’t know who the girl is or what she’s thinking. Indeed, we know very little about Vermeer. He lived his whole life in the Dutch town of Delft. He married a Catholic woman and probably converted, he lived at his mother-in-law’s, and had 11 children. He was in debt several times. He was an art dealer as well as an artist – and that’s about the extent of our knowledge, apart from his work.
The girl’s expression is pleasingly ambiguous. Is she happy or sad? Is she pushing us away or yearning to look at us? And who is “us,” anyway? I had been studying the painting for years when one day it dawned on me: of course she’s not looking at me like that – I wasn’t there! She’s looking at the painter with that curious wide-eyed gaze. It made me wonder what Vermeer did to her to make her look like that at him. That curiosity was what led me to write a novel about the painting: I wanted to explore the mystery of her gaze. To me Girl with a Pearl Earring is neither a universal tronie, nor a portrait of a specific person. It is a portrait of a relationship.
In considering the painting, there is an immediate beauty that draws us in, and a familiarity that satisfies us. But in the end, it is the mystery that keeps us coming back to it again and again, looking for answers that we never find.
Beauty, familiarity, mystery. These are the qualities of Girl with a Pearl Earring that make it an iconic masterpiece. The painting is like a song that ends on the second-to-last chord: we are drawn to look at it again in the hope that this time the last chord will be played, the painting will resolve itself, the mystery will dissipate, and we can leave the girl alone at last.
Vermeer created 36 paintings that we’re aware of, many of them depicting women on their own, doing everyday things like pouring milk, writing letters, playing lutes. We have no idea who these women are, though they are likely to be members of the family household. This means we don’t know what the relationship is between the girl wearing the pearl earring and the painter.
Tracy Chevalier’s story shares some of the striking qualities of Vermeer’s paintings. Her subject is a single woman caught in a private moment. Like the Dutch master, she’s fascinated by the play of light, the suggestive power of small details, and the subtle thoughts beneath placid expressions.
The story is told by Griet, a young woman in Delft. Her family, never prosperous, has been thrown into desperate circumstances by a recent kiln accident that blinded her father. While her young brother is sent to a harsh tile factory, Griet finds work as a maid in the home of Johannes Vermeer.
Now and then Chevalier’s style seems self-consciously rich. Her poor, illiterate narrator sounds at times as though she’s earned a master’s degree in creative writing, as the author has. But, that aside, Chevalier re-creates common life in Delft with fascinating authenticity. The smells of the marketplace, the drudgery of laundry, the subtle tensions between servants – it all comes across here viscerally.
Vermeer’s house is full of his own children and other people’s paintings. Griet finds it something of a land mine. Their Roman Catholic faith is an unsettling mystery to her. The painter’s daughters are eager to test her authority. His wife resents the competition for her husband’s attention. And the careful old mother-in-law is willing to do anything to increase Vermeer’s meager artistic output.
With wonderfully effective restraint, Chevalier captures the glances and brief comments that gradually lead Griet into her master’s studio, his painting, and finally his heart.
Any sign of intimacy with Vermeer’s work would mean certain dismissal by the painter’s captious, continually pregnant wife, but Griet can’t help but stare at his haunting portraits when everyone else has gone to bed.
Though they’re very quiet moments, the most exciting scenes are those of Griet slowly learning to see with greater perception and understand the nature of light and shadow. Soon, she’s making crucial recommendations to the master about shading, composition, and color.
When Vermeer’s raunchy patron insists on a portrait of Griet, he forces a crisis that exposes the thicket of affections and jealousies coursing below the surface of this house.
"I wanted to know the man who painted like that,” Griet thinks one day while dusting Vermeer’s studio. That knowledge is ultimately denied her - and us - but his elusive quality seems as accurate as the rest of this luminous novel.
Tracy Chevalier’s novel speculating about the painting was of course filmed by Peter Webber, who casts Scarlett Johansson as the girl and Colin Firth as Vermeer. I can think of many ways the film could have gone wrong, but it goes right, because it doesn’t cook up melodrama and romantic intrigue but tells a story that’s content with its simplicity. The painting is contemplative, reflective, subdued, and the film must be, too: We don’t want lurid revelations breaking into its mood.
Sometimes two people will regard each other over a gulf too wide to ever be bridged, and know immediately what could have happened, and that it never will. That is essentially the message of this quiet lush film.
<<Willy Wonka is a pretty creepy character, no doubt. The book is known for a rather dark nature in how it handles naughty kids. In the story, other candy makers are jealous of Wonka’s success and send spies to uncover the secrets of his factory. In fear of being ruined, he fires all of his employees and closes the factory. Five years later, it reopens with a new staff comprised of discolored and identical African pygmies called “Oompa Loompas”. I understand hiding a secret recipe to making candy, but it isn’t that difficult. Thousands of people work for Coca-Cola but only two people know what the recipe to coke really is. What kind of terrible secrets could Wonka be hiding in the factory? This theorist believes that Wonka’s various candies are made from children.
Wonka is not necessarily evil; he just has a very messed up scale of morality where he designs his tour to try and tempt each children with a karmic fate to evaluate if they are worthy of living or not by setting up traps or gambits which kills them. Augustus Gloop can’t control his gluttony when he gets to the Chocolate Room and falls into the chocolate river, and is sucked up a large pipe. That’s a fairly large pipe.Large enough for a Human being. Why would you make it that big for the chocolate river? Wonka set it up so that children are easily transported throughout the factory through these pipes to the various rooms.
huWe see a similar mechanic again with the Nut Room, where there is a large tube that connects to an incinerator. The Nut Room has a bunch of squirrels testing walnut out to see if they are a “bad nut”. Veruca Salt wants to have one of the squirrels, but Wonka denies her the request, so she tries to take one for herself. Wonka hardly tries to hide his murderous intents with this one and Veruca is thrown into the chute by the entire squirrel squad. The squirrels are trained to work together in dragging people into the chute, apparently. Also, in the 2005 movie adaptation, when Wonka is asked to quickly find the key to the chute from a huge bunch of keys, it takes him ages to try and see which is the correct one, but as soon as Veruca has disappeared down, it turns out that he knew the right one all along, since he immediately opens the gate.
Before this, the group travels to the Inventing Room where Wonka shows off the “Three-Course Dinner Chewing Gum”, a dangerous, experimental candy which has the side-effect of turning people into blueberries. Violet, boasting she can consume it and being prideful, grabs the gum and turns into a giant blueberry (she remains a Human but she has become large, blue, and juicy). Wonka has some Oompa Loompas take her to the Juicing Room to get back to normal. Turning into a fruit is a pretty big effect and doesn’t seem like some kind of mistake and showing it off to a bunch of careless, candy-loving kids is not a smart idea. When Wonka captured children, originally, in order to make a child even more useful, he fed them these dinner gums so they can become different fruits and taken to the juicing room to get an endless supply of “natural” flavors. The Television Room’s original use may be obvious: turning kids bite-sized in order to harness all of their flavors for a candy. The shrunken kids could of also been used for manufacturing tiny aspects of small candies, like molding them.
Going back to Augustus – neverbinkles on Reddit noticed an odd thing about the boat: “Willy Wonka knew those children would die in his factory. After Augustus gets sucked up the shoot, they all hop on board the boat through the tunnel of doom. The boat doesn’t have two extra vacant seats though. It was designed with prior knowledge that they would lose two participants before that point. Later they drive a cream spewing car with only four seats. Did they have another car waiting in the garage in case the others made it? Of course not. Willy Wonka uses children to make candy.”
Still think this idea is crazy? Well, in the original version of the novel, there was an omitted chapter and sixth child named Miranda Piker, who seemingly falls down the “Spotty Powder Mixer” to be chopped to death, screaming. The screams turn into laughter as Miranda survives. Why would a mixer, which seems to be easily traversed and below a large area, be necessary? Mrs. Piker calls Wonka a murderer, “I know your tricks! You’re grinding them into powder! In two minutes my darling Miranda will come pouring out of one of those dreadful pipes.” Guess what Wonka replies. “Of course, that’s part of the recipe!” Wonka notices that Miranda is still alive and is joking around with Mrs. Piker. Sure, its like Wonka to joke around, but this is a bit messed up.
And what about the Oompa Loompas? Not only are they fine with helping Wonka out with these murders, but they take joy in it, singing and dancing. Well, I’m trying really hard to sound racist here, but cannibalism in Africa is the rarest of things.
The 2005 film adaptation cranks Wonka’s creep factor up to eleven. In this version, Wonka has a personal reason to hate people, as they bullied him for wearing a large mouth brace, his father prevented his creative freedom, and, like the other versions, the other candy companies were greedy and attacked Wonka’s factory.>>
“Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold.”
