not.” Against these anxieties and regrets William possessed only one weapon: language, wordplay. Every day he felt he was losing a little more of his wife and every day he felt he must fight to win her back, so he labored over his letters, making corrections, emendations, fixing rare grammatical mistakes, turning the pages 90 degrees and adding sentences at right angles in the margins, trying to find the magic incantation of symbols to crush the globe
