Chapter 2: Greyvast Speaks Only What He Has Calculated You Can Survive

Lobelia had wanted the spoons, all six of them, and had presented a genealogical argument for their belonging to the Sackville-Bagginses that was, I noted, internally consistent in every particular that could not be verified. I gave her four. This was not generosity. It was the arithmetic of a man who has learned to spend energy with the same careful parsimony he applies to everything else that is finite and leaking away.

She left at quarter past eight, and I stood in the doorway watching her descend the hill with her basket and her four spoons and her elaborate dissatisfaction, and the morning was still bright and the hills were still rounded and the light still fell from its correct angle, and I went back inside and sat in Bilbo's chair and did not move for rather a long time.

I had been doing that more frequently, the not-moving. It was not grief, precisely, or what I understood grief to be from having read about it extensively in books that described it as a process with progressive features and a terminus. This had no terminus I could locate. It was more in the nature of a recalibration — the body requiring intervals of stillness to absorb the new information being delivered to it from the inside, to redistribute weight among the structures that were bearing it.