This “lesser writer’s” version reads like a sequence of unrelated events. Nothing causes anything else. Some things . . . occur. But we don’t know why. The result of the sequence (“they get lost”) feels out of relation with what came before. They just get lost randomly, for no reason, and this means nothing. We move through the sequence with that frustrated, unmoored feeling we get when following a clueless tour guide. “What are we supposed to be noting?” we wonder.
