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[hauntmethen]

Emily Brontë has a poem about a woman in jail who says

A messenger of Hope, comes every night to me

And offers, for short life, eternal Liberty.

I wonder what kind of Liberty this is.

[...]

She [Charlotte Brontë] gently probes this recess in her Editor’s Preface to Wuthering Heights.

“A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only—a blank line filling the interval.”

Well, there are different definitions of Liberty.

[...]

But blank lines do not say nothing.

As Charlotte puts it,

“The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does—what feeling it spares— what horror it conceals.”

 

— Anne Carson. The Glass Essay from 'Glass, Irony and God'

During the five months of her trial Joan persistently chose the term voice or a few times counsel or once comfort to describe how God guided her. She did not spontaneously claim that the voices had bodies, faces, names, smell, warmth or mood, nor that they entered the room by the door, nor that when they left she felt bad. Under the inexorable urging of her inquisitors she gradually added all these details. But the storytelling effort was clearly hateful to her and she threw white paint on it wherever she could, giving them responses like:

… You asked that before. Go look at the record.

… Pass on to the next question, spare me.

… I knew that well enough once but I forget.

… That does not touch your process.

… Ask me next Saturday.

And one day when the judges were pressing her to define the voices as singular or plural, she most wonderfully said: “The light comes in the name of the voice.”

— Anne Carson. Variations on the right to remain silent from 'Nay Rather'