It’s a spoon! A little ol’ spoon! Exactly like the one we lost in that cave that day! I mean exactly!”

something great, something wondrous, something completely unimaginable is there aborning.

“Where does magic and beauty go when it’s driven from the world?” At the grate, there was

Yes. Please. A little more. A speck more in the line of practical advice. “Very well. The trick is this: keep your eye on the ball. Even when you can’t see the ball.” You’re kidding, thought Ellen Cherry Charles.

“We make it up. We made it up. We shall make it up. We have been making it up. I make it up. You make it up. He, she, it makes it up.” Okay, I’m an artist, I can accept that. In theory. But how do I apply it to my daily life? “You’ll have to figure . . .”

Come on, now. What’s the punch line? There’s got to be something else. Until, finally, a voice inside her said: “We’re making it up.” Who? What? “Us. All of us. It. All of it. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.” We’re making it up?

The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross.

Nor could you turn it over to some chatty, disembodied entity channeled from the other side. (The dead are laughing at us, remember.)

Everybody’s got to figure it out for themselves.