Blog Post #5: Fairy Tale

Blog Post #4: "Roots" Extension

“Owen's voice wavered. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. 'You told me once that a soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building a soul-- not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those who knew you. Which is partly why your death is so hard for us. it's hard to accept that a soul like yours, which took a lifetime to build, could cease to exist. It makes us angry, furious at the universe, not to have you here. But of course, your soul does exist, Guert, because you gave so much of it so unstintingly. It exists in your book, and in this school, and also in each of us. For that we'll always be grateful.' Owen looked up, lifting the beam of his reading light. It passed over each of them again. He smiled. 'And we'll miss your corporal form, which was also nice.' Pella was weeping like crazy, as quietly as she could. That stuff about making a soul--she wondered whether her dad had really said it, or whether Owen had derived it himself, as a sort of synthesis of what her dad believed. Either way it was remarkable, and she glimpsed for the first time how close they were, how their relationship may not have been a static, one-sided kind of smitten worship, as she lazily imagined it, but a real and powerful thing. She was shivering, and Mike put his arm around her. Despite the appalling heat of the day before and the day to come, despite the heat of the scotch she'd been drinking, the four a.m. breeze that came over the water felt cutting and frigid. It was time for her to say something, to do right by her father somehow, but it was impossible, there was too much to say and no way to say it. Owen reached across and handed her something. A piece of paper, folded into quarters. She unfolded it, but it was too dark to see. "Here." Owen took of his Harpooners cap and, as Pella leaned forward, placed it on her head. In the beam of the battery powered light she could see what he handed her; a typed copy of 'The Lee Shore,' the short chapter of Moby Dick that was her father's favorite piece of writing, the source of his old password, and, not incidentally, the poetic epitaph of a brave and handsome man. She'd known it by heart since she was six, and once she'd started she didn't need the page. When her dad recited it in lecture he did so with a stage actor's vigor, shouting his was through the exclamation points, as if to remind the students that old books contained strong feelings. She couldn't do that now, but in a hushed way she tried to do the passage justice. Mike squeezed her hand. When she finished, Mike took a pair of scissors form his pocket and cut slits in the bag, so that it would fill with water and sink. He and Henry knelt beside the body, cradled its length with both arms, and, very slowly so as not to capsize them all, scooped Affenlight up and over the side."

Blog Post #3: "BWT" Performance