I understood as I turned out the light in my study after putting my books away, the pale blue, the faded red, had been in Jenny’s mind that day thirty years before when she had murmured, Well, you can’t begin to write anything until you’ve read everything. How lucky I had been in my teachers, who had invited me to become a link in the chain that connects the past to the present. And how much my father had missed, as I saw only now, when he turned the invitation down. Like father, like son. Not always, I thought. Not all genealogies, I said to myself that January night after the first class
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