[PSL] in this sense the open jaws of wild beasts will appear no less pleasing than their prototypes

[katabasis]

The bread that is over-baked so that it cracks and bursts asunder hath not the form desired by the baker; yet none the less it hath a beauty of its own, and is most tempting to the palate. Figs bursting in their ripeness, olives near even unto decay, have yet in their broken ripeness a distinctive beauty.

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[katabasis]

It comes out of a dream.

'What is it that you want, James? What can possibly be the point to this now?' Miranda asks him across a rough hewn table in the house which was built for her. A pot of tea sits between them, its cups gone cold under their fingertips. All her hair is spills down around her shoulders and she reaches for him, one half curled hand that he can't bear to touch.

A letter had come by way of Jamaica, by way of a maid, by way of an old friend, by way of a colleague in parliament, by way of-- and the shape of it even now, weeks (months) later, sits between them. A ghost. It is the most concrete version of Thomas Hamilton to exist in the Bahamas and it is heartbreaking. His wife is so unhappy. James is so--

He can't answer her. He stares at the filled cup. The chair feels uneven. The world is so unbalanced that it shouldn't hold him. People should cling to window frames. The sea should be falling away.

James, please, she begs him. She doesn't cry. Maybe she's used all her tears while he's been away. Maybe she buried them between the floorboards, in the dirt of this island they must love by necessity. Maybe this is all there is. Maybe a person can be reduced to a box of things, to letters on a page, to a painting, to words in a book that only matter to two people in all of God's creation.

Eventually, he rouses himself. He circles the lip of the cup with his thumb and forefinger; the porcelain is so delicate and the small leaves painted there are so alien to these latitudes.

'I just wanted someone to know,' he says, mechanical. 'That's all.'

I did, her face had said. Isn't that good enough? Doesn't that matter to you?

It did. It does. It's so bewilderingly surreal that he can't bring himself to move as the woman closes to distance to meet them in the road. He feels removed from his body, a distant observer to the way the Quaker minister throws her arms around Thomas and the stricken, impossible look on his battered face in return. Thomas Hamilton, James thinks, is unspeakably beautiful. His grip, his trembling hand with his long lovely fingers, is so fierce that it hurts the small bones under it.

Every person in the whole world should love him this way, James thinks, and covers his eyes with his muddy free hand and cries into his fingers.