Enlightenment

by Sarah Perry

THIS DO IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME.

Grace Macaulay saw it, and

beauty secures love so easily, and often without meaning to.”

“that his face was better than his work.

and she’d felt her affection for him increase by the quantity of love her aunt no longer needed.

So the sky at night offered him a liturgy, and he attended devoutly to

the inscrutable beauty of its syllables and propositions:

But I have been content. I have lived. I have felt everything available to me: I’ve been faithless, devout, indifferent, ardent, diligent, and careless; full of hope and disappointment, bewildered by time and fate or comforted by providence—and all of it ticking through me while the pendulum of my life loses amplitude by the hour.

How very like a dog I have been, rooting in the sky for a stick to bring her master!