Who Asks the Question

Let us go back to Repin’s room.

A man with a suction cap on his eyeball sits in front of a canvas on which a thin guest stands in the doorway and a woman has frozen in mid-movement. Three minutes, several hundred stops of the gaze, the film winding on. Before the showing he was told one sentence, and everything he will end up seeing depends on that sentence.

That is where we began. That is where we have to end.

Over twelve chapters we have covered a fairly long road, and it is worth making sure that it led in one direction.