The spirit is too blunt an instrument to have made this baby. Nothing so unskilful as human passions could have managed the intricate exacting particulars: the tiny blind bones with their manipulating tendons, the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae in the chain of the difficult spine.

Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent fingernails, the shell-like complexity of the ear with its firm involutions concentric in miniature to the minute ossicles. Imagine the infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments through which the completed body already answers to the brain.

Then name any passion or sentiment possessed of the simplest accuracy. No. No desire or affection could have done with practice what habit has done perfectly, indifferently, through the body's ignorant precision. It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent love and despair and anxiety and their pain.

You have no place in this garden thinking such things, producing the tiresome outward signs; the man pointedly weeding an entire forest, the woman limping, refusing to change clothes or wash her hair.

Do you suppose I care if you speak to one another? But I mean you to know I expected better of two creatures who were given minds: if not that you would actually care for each other at least that you would understand grief is distributed between you, among all your kind, for me to know you, as deep blue marks the wild scilla, white the wood violet.

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived to revenge myself against my father, not for what he was— for what I was: from the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.