He stood, bound by something he could not name, something he would not have thought to identify until that moment because it seemed to him a given, like being born with bones and flesh, a set of relations deeper than any order, a law that was subject to no conversion or alteration because it was lodged in the veins, in the blood, in the very fact

And who named the structure, who got to pick?

And very still and holy the dead men looked when the boy and his gang had laid them out on the wagon with their souls exposed. Music rose around them, the gang singing a funeral chant as they wheeled the bodies to meet the compost train.

because he was so ordinary and yet so strange, an ordinary boy who had made himself strange through a Practice so simple anyone could take it up, because everybody breathes.

he possessed nothing but bones and a chain and a wish to touch the truth. This longing for awareness he called the Practice.

She remembered her father seated in the evening, his face filled up with gentleness—or was it gentleness, could it have been something else? Suddenly she realized she didn’t know what her father’s face had held, and she was frightened.

But sometimes, when he learned something new, the feeling he had was not so different from what he had felt as a little boy, waking with a sore ankle and springing up to test the length of the chain.

The regular students, the ones with phones, had received a lesson in difference. It was good for them, said Gil. And the boy had not been expelled.

Everything is good for them, the woman thought suddenly. The thought startled her. Its violence. Gil’s bracelet clicked against his keyboard. The woman remembered a line from the jaded elder’s draft of the project, now deleted: Can the University be a place of both training and transformation?