Part Six - “Prove That I'm Not!” – Toward the Impossibility of Interpretation

Summary

I might push it away, but I couldn't really get rid of it; nor, on the whole, doubtless, did I want to, for to have in one's life, year after year, a particular question or two that one couldn't comfortably and imposingly make up one's mind about was just the sort of thing to keep one from turning stupid.

“Maud–Evelyn,” 1900

“I'm not a prophet or a soothsayer, and still less a charlatan, and don't pretend to the gift of second sight – I only confess to have cultivated my imagination, as one has to in a country [the United States] where there is nothing to take that trouble off one's hands. Therfore perhaps it is that things glimmer upon me at moments from a distance, so that I find myself in the act of catching them, but am liable to lose them again, and to feel nervous, as if I had made a fool of myself, when an honest man like my cousin Perry looks at me as if he thought me a little mad. I'm not mad, cousin Perry – I'm only a mite bewildered by the way I seem to affect you…. ”

“I like your free talk – I like it, I like it!” Molly broke in at this. “I wouldn'st have it a bit different, though we have certainly never heard anything like it in all our lives. I'sm not afraid of you now,” the girl continued, “or else I'sm no more so than I want to be….”

The Sense of the Past, unfinished