Between-ing: Collaborative Writing and the Unfoldings of Relational Space

Abstract

In conversation with Claire Parnet, Deleuze is quoted as saying, “(w)e were only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us.” Deleuze’s concept of “between-the-two” has been used by “Gale and Wyatt,” as a leitmotif for the collaborative writing with which they have engaged “between the two” and also in collaboration with others. The persistence and longevity of this usage has led to the possibility that an “image of thought” has been brought to life which is constitutive of the “us” rather than the “betweened.” In this, have “Gale and Wyatt” continued to swim in the calm, unquestioning, and welcoming waters of qualitative inquiry? Have they, in so doing, avoided those eddies, swirls, rip currents, and deep, dark waters of post qualitative inquiry that might be working to pull them out into the turbulent seas of free and wild concept making where, in becoming, their writing might move away from the applications and representations of simply human-centric thought and action and be of a more immanent doing? In this article, “Gale and Wyatt” address their alertness to the doing of this image of thought. They ask, does their collaborative writing rest more on the “two” of them, the people doing the writing, than on the “between” that talks more the materiality of relational space(s) unfolding amid them? In this article, they affirmatively critique this possibility. They ask: Between the two? How does this betweening work? What does this betweening do? Only two?

Openings

In conversation with Claire Parnet, Deleuze is quoted as saying, “(w)e were only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us.” Deleuze’s concept of “between-the-two” has been used by “Gale and Wyatt,” first as the title of their book written together and then increasingly, discursively perhaps, as a leitmotif for the collaborative writing with which they have engaged “between the two” of them and also in collaboration with others. The persistence and longevity of this usage has led to the possibility that an “image of thought” (Deleuze, 1983, p. 103) has been brought to life which is constitutive of the “us” rather than the “betweened.” In this, have Gale and Wyatt continued to swim in the calm, unquestioning, and welcoming waters of “conventional humanist qualitative inquiry” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 654)? Have they, in so doing, avoided those eddies, swirls, rip currents, and deep, dark waters of post qualitative inquiry that might be working to pull them out into the turbulent seas of free and wild concept making where, in becoming, their writing might move away from the applications and representations of simply human centric thought and action and be of a more immanent doing?

In this article “Gale and Wyatt” address their alertness to the doing of this “image of thought.” They ask, does their collaborative writing rest more on the “two” of them, the people doing the writing, than on the “between” that talks more the materiality of relational space(s) unfolding amid them? In this article, they affirmatively critique this possibility. They ask provocative questions that concern them: Between the two? What is that? What is there? What about the “us” that is betweened? How does this betweening work? How does betweening spatialize and actualize? What does this betweening do? Is the writing of an immanent “between the two” plausible or ever possible? Only two?

Alone in a Strange Empty House . . .

Alone in a strange empty house: he knew that he had to write. He sat with darkness barely giving way to light, the glow of his laptop illuminating the early morning gloom. He sat at a table full of clutter that was not his. The vibrant immediacy of a material world not of his making startled him into writing.

Alone in a familiar, quiet office on Monday morning he begins to write. He has read those opening lines. “Read” (past tense) isn’t enough: too ocular, too easy, taken-for-granted. Try again:

He begins to hear the sound of keys pressing, of Ken breathing, of fingers moving fast; he begins to feel the darkness, how it lies against the skin. He begins to hear himself writing, Ken beside him, somehow, here, in the mid-morning emptiness.

Alone in a familiar, quiet Edinburgh office, he has read Ken’s opening lines and written his.

Alone in a stranger’s single bed a few hours before, he had been unable to sleep. His restlessness led him to the small pile of books, tumbling out of his bag, lying on the floor beside the bed. He remembered the night before, falling fitfully in and out of consciousness, reading Cixous. Now her words echoed in the shadowy darkness of his early morning thoughts. Partially wakened by the effects of strong sugary tea, he picked up the book again, searched the pages and, as if to somehow preserve the words by doing so, copied them out, writing them carefully on a clean page in his notebook:

Writing: a way of leaving no space for death, of pushing back forgetfulness, of never letting oneself be surprised by the abyss. Of never becoming resigned, consoled; never turning over in bed to face the wall and drift asleep again as if nothing had happened; as if nothing could happen. (Cixous, 1991, p. 3)

Alone with his thoughts, he remembered words from the hubbub of conversation bubbling from the scatter of people gathered together in the darkened room the previous night. He remembered how his senses were being lit by the flow of conversation, by the intermittent toing and froing of ideas, by the sparkling incandescent nascence of ideas coming to life as voices wove their patterns with the vibrant pulse of music, the heavy perfume of incense, and the seething affective forces making movements in the moment.

He encounters his colleague, his friend, Karen, in the kitchen as he makes coffee. He is no longer alone. They exchange news of their weekend—yoga for Karen and swimming in the sea for him. (He goes to the beach most weekends, even in November, and he always thinks of Ken, always wants to send him a photo afterwards to say, “Look where I am! Feel this moment with me! Feel the joy!.” Sending a photo wouldn’t be enough, though.) He and Karen catch up on their reading and writing together, the project they’re undertaking about posthumanism and postcolonialism. He returns to his desk and to writing. He wants to share with Ken something of his writing/reading with Karen.

He wants to be there in the hubbub with Ken. He wants to talk with him about Cixous. He loves the quote Ken has cited and reads aloud how it opens, “Writing: a way of leaving no space for death,” feeling it in his chest and in his belly. He stands, walks to his shelves, takes his Cixous books to his desk and finds a quote he’s highlighted, one he’s cited probably more than once: “Writing: touching the mystery, delicately, with the tips of the words, trying not to crush it, in order to un-lie” (Cixous, 1991, p. 134). He’s held by “mystery”; what this mystery, today’s mystery, may be, may become; whether between Ken and Jonathan, in the movement between them, between all this, here and there—hereinthere, thereinhere, there—inhere—this writing can reach out, delicate in its touch, toward that mystery. He holds his breath.

Alone, barely later, slowly emerging into light; the echoes of a thousand thoughts turning into waking dreams, he found himself turning over in this nomad bed, Cixous’ words woven into his tentative wakingness, the fragility of life taunting his existence. Cixous talking of coming to writing, the necessity of the presencing of writing somehow putting off the contingent necessity of death. A brief movement; an encounter, only for a moment, only for a moment. The ontological indeterminacy of this incessance; movements into moments, moments into movements, chronological time dissolving as the immediacy of living in the now, becoming in its irresistibility. There is everything and nothing in the more-than of the impossibility of capture. Deleuze, in the writing of his last essay before his death wrote of the pure immanence of a life. Life as immanent only in relation to its self, to its selfing. The hugeness of this small, italicized letter, in becoming as a word, explodes in the immediacy that startles in its expression. This is this.

He is writing in italics. He stops doing so, for a moment, so he too can write the a of a life like that, so it can be seen, stand out, lift from the page. A single letter, a word in itself, and, like Ken says, vast; a vastness surrounding him, them, this; in him, them, this; this, just this. A life.

Alone again, he wrote as affective presencing in the nowness and continuing emergence of these mo(ve)ments:

Writing, looking out over trees, their leaves yellowing and falling in their homage to the demands of autumn; writing, allowing no space for death. Words welling up. A text arrives from you. This out of the blue is out of the gray to blue nimbus hue through the mist-laden curtains. You talk of swimming at North Berwick and though I have never physically visited this place, prompted by your writing I soak in its atmosphere, I sense the waves crashing on the beach. I see a small church overlooking the sea and with anger and sadness I imagine the cruelty of the witching times and in becoming my heart bleeds for the good women who were purged by the patriarchal hypocrisies and religious hatefulness of an earlier time. I trust that the joy that you experience as you shiver, tumble, and breathe life with those ever turning, always crashing waves will help to affectively diminish the wrong doings that must soak the air in the beauty of the place to which you continue to return and experience so much sensual joy.

Ken takes him back to the beach and Sunday; the surprising, worrying warmth of the November day; the startling chill of the water; how he shouts at the cold, his futile cursing making her laugh. She stands, waiting in the water, acclimatizing, still, as he rages. The waves are gentle, not crashing, more like a folding onto the beach. They love it when the waves crash, when the waves’ rage echoes his, and the waves’ force brooks no argument; when the waves crash they’re in before they know it, laughing, playing. Not on Sunday, though.

Alone once again in his office, he double-takes, shifts in his seat, stands, stretches, returns. Ken draws attention to North Berwick’s chilling history, the two years of trials in the 16 ^th century, the torture, the forced “confessions”; the apology, offered only this year in 2022, five hundred years later, from Scotland’s First Minister. Writing, as Cixous says, pushes back forgetfulness. Even as we might find it easier to forget.

He notices Ken calls to him, addresses him. “You,” he writes. You. You, here, with me. I.

It warms me as I sense the arrival of your text in the middling of this writing. It furthers the nurturing of immanent doing, it is force taking on the capturing proclivities of form, in-formation, animate, always in play.

“[F]orce taking on the capturing proclivities of form, in-formation, animate, always in play.” I need to form the words, say them out loud. Waves, force under pressure, becoming form, captured in their rising, curving, breaking; their “bodying forth” (Papagaroufali, 2008; Spry, 2010).

Unexpected words arrive, always positive, kind and thoughtful, “in another hectic phase . . . holding up well. Hope you’re well. Let’s speak again soon.” The presencing of the virtual, minor gestures (Manning, 2016), unexpected, surprising and always force/full in bringing together and composting the vibrancy of this pulsing plane of composition. Deleuze is never far away as these texted words immediate and energize the immanence of a life.

A life contains only virtuals. It is made up of virtualities, events, singularities. What we call virtual is not something that lacks reality but something that is engaged in a process of actualisation following the plane that gives it its particular reality. The immanent event is actualised in a state of things and of the lived that make it happen. (Deleuze, 2002, p. 31)

The immanent force of this always emergent field is the more-than of simple experience. It is not that the early morning writing and the arrival in its midst of the unexpected text that is important.

I find myself reading and re-reading your lines. Your words open, transport, reframe, shift. I am not who I was before I read them. I’m not where I was. Words like waves. I brace as their force sweeps over, through. The writing, its unexpectedness, its arrival in the early morning. Text, its timing, its surprise—the words actualizing at this moment in this way—these are unique, distinctive. They are what makes those words different from any others we have exchanged. Yet, they are not what matters, they are not the “thing itself.” They do not “represent.” They are a doing, of affect. An intimating (Gale, 2021).

I have walked from my office to Cult, a favorite writing café. I have moved to follow the forces of your writing, this writing. I am no longer alone and no longer writing in the third person. The energy has changed. Callum brings me coffee. He tells me it’s his final day. He’s moving to Canada. The coffee is special, he says, not because he’s leaving but because they happen to have a rare brew today. As usual he expects me to guess its country of origin. I will guess and I will be wrong and he will make me keep guessing.

In the cartography of this Ken/Jonathan encounter, it is not enough to see the singularity of these acts as representations of experience, to be wrapped up in the objectifications and cozy empirical accounting of qualitative inquiry. Such an approach is redolent of what Whitehead refers to as a “happy simplification of method” (Whitehead, in Manning, 2020, p. 75). No, it seems that when we talk of these events as singularities in a compositional plan of immanence, something more powerfully affective is on the move. As we begin to think about the “between the two” of Jonathan and Ken, it is less about them and more about the actualizing of the immanent event that takes place between them.

And so . . .

It is here, into the middling of these events that the “I’s” of “Jonathan” and “Ken” need to be drawn.

Here, as Callum brings me a second coffee, as Joy Division plays, as love, love will tear us apart again, as writing leaves no space for death, as writing instead creates space for life, for love and its force and its possibilities.

It is in the unfolding affect of these “atmospheric architectures” (Bohme, 2017) that the ontological indeterminacies of the “we” we have written so much about needs to be drawn.

It is on these tentative “landing sites” that Arakawa and Gins (2002) posit that these “I’s” need to alight and to begin the journeyings of nomadism afresh.

Pressing on the keys lightly, delicately, taking off from there, pushing back forgetfulness.

It is necessary, as St. Pierre argues in her “post qualitative inquiry in an ontology of immanence,” that we need to be inventing concepts that “reorient thinking . . . where the not-yet glimmers seductively then escapes in fits and starts” (St. Pierre et al., 2019: 3).

It is to tease and to draw us away from the ontological certainties and empirical transcendences of the Ken(s) and Jonathan(s) that we know, love and have written so much about and to set the collaborations of these domesticated selves loose in the constantly deterritorializing proclivities and processualisms, the uncertainties, doubts, and mysteries of the between.

As writing happens; as writing happens in immanence; as writing happens with adventure, with a little trepidation, unsurprised by the abyss.

As She Enters the Room . . .

As she enters the room and moves toward the empty desk in front of the window, on it she notices the open notebook, loose, scattered pages, the pencil, an empty wine glass, and the still glowing presence of the table lamp barely visible in the limp but growing strength of the early morning light. She is drawn to the papers in the middle of the desk, increasingly fascinated by the erratic dance of barely legible writing seemingly freshly written on their creased and curling pages, the deep impress of penciled scars scratching out unwanted words, and the frenzy of annotations diagonalizing up and down the sides of each writing page. She absorbs the whole before she picks out words to read. She experiences surprise and a curious sensation of witnessing an image of tentative calm after the ravages of a violent storm.

As they enter the café, they see the man in the window on the left, by the door. He appears to be writing at his laptop. They take a seat next to him. He senses something; a disturbance, a shift in what’s present. The shift leads him to pause, square his hunched shoulders, roll his neck, and look up and around (song-writer Adam, whom he sees here most visits, reading on his phone, and a woman he doesn’t know to his right, also on her phone); and to notice the quiet (a faint conversation the other end of the café, the Marvin Gaye soundtrack). He returns to writing.

Seated next to him they can see his screen; less the words themselves (he deserves some privacy, after all), more the appearance of black text in lines on a white “page.” They notice how he pauses. He smiles sometimes, like he recognizes something, or someone; someone or something he likes. Something or someone in his writing. They notice he pauses often. He is more pause than writing. He pauses, writes a few words, deletes, writes again, pauses, deletes again, and writes. It’s not exciting to witness, not a compelling spectacle, but they are patient. They too look around, noticing where he is; this, here, his chosen writing milieu. There is no rush. Watching him write is like watching grass grow: it does, but you can’t.

And then she is drawn to the writing. She moves to the desk, pulls back the little wooden chair with his leather jacket still draped over the back of it, eases herself into the space between desk and chair, sits down, places her elbows on the desktop, her hands supporting her chin and, slowly and carefully, begins to read . . .

He stands up, leaving his laptop open, which he does here, and heads to the counter with his empty cup. He orders a second coffee. There’s always a second coffee. He stays, talking to the barista about the coffee. They see he’s preoccupied and take the opportunity to shuffle along the window bench, curious. Privacy be damned: they begin to read.

And then there are voices through the wall. Voices that have a halting effect. Voices that alert to the immediacy of a becoming body that is no longer there. Voices that spirit into existence experiences that have no beginning or end. There is no beginning to writing; the ending comes when the body breathes no more and still in the quietness of that empty room, those words whirl around the walls. Cixous asked when saying was the doing, what else is there to do but write. In the tension of desolation in that quiet, lonely room, the lamp glowing in its movement with shade, the stained wine glass empty by its side, in the emphatic resonance becoming dissonance, becoming is all and everything that remains.

Though it has appeared not much has been happening, they see words. They notice, too, the book alongside and behind the laptop, out of sight from where they were. They notice it’s open at page 111 and, on the screen, how he has been writing with/from it: Robert MacFarlane’s (2019) “Underland.” How MacFarlane, drawing from Kimmerer (2013), is talking about mushrooms; how the Central Algonquia language, Potawatomi, has a single word, “puhpowee,” to mean “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 111). They look up from the book’s cover to read the quote the man has copied onto his screen:

In Potawatomi, not only humans, animals and trees are alive, but so too are mountains, boulders, winds and fire. Stories, songs and rhythms are all also animate, they are, they be. Potwatomomi is a language abundant with verbs: 70 per cent of its words are verbs, compared to 30 per cent in English. (p. 112)

“Wiikwegamaa,” for instance, means “to be a bay.” “A bay is a noun only if water is dead,” writes Kimmerer (2013, p. 77), apparently.

They scroll through the text. Below and above this writing about MacFarlane’s work is more writing, another’s writing, in plain text not italics. It reads like fiction: there’s a woman reading a man’s handwritten text. The man is not there. He has left, gone. We don’t know why. This man’s notebook that she’s reading is full of writing about writing. Very meta, they think. Writing does, the narrator claims: “Writing is doing, immanent in its doneness.”

They see the man coming back to his screen with coffee—a batch brew this time—and they shuffle up, fading into something.

The man is doing, they see that. Writing is happening in between. It’s done already.

“Spiriting” (Gale, 2023) animates the forcefulness of encounter. Words can only do. There is a learning in the simplicity of the assertion that words are performative, they move life-ing imperceptibly or they take the engagement in encounter to worlds in the more-than of the knowing and the always yet to be known. Writing without forethought is doing in immanence; there is no sensing of precession, no intentional predictions of where writing might lead. Writing: a movement, a moment. In a flash, writing is done. Writing is doing, immanent in its doneness. No punctuations other than the need to take another breath, another wondering glance across at the empty glass, an allowing of the brief leaning back from the late night screen glow and then a rush of askings: Is this ok? Is there more? What is this? Where is this going?

At first fragmented by the foibles of memory, Jonathan’s words then came racing back in a rush, their insistent presencing, immediating, shifting his body, bodying, gasping with urgency, he found them, wrote them down. Sitting back, reading them again . . .

He’s held by “mystery”; what this mystery, today’s mystery, may be, may become; whether between Ken and Jonathan, in the movement between them, here and there (hereinthere), between all this, this writing can reach out, delicate in its touch, towards that mystery. He holds his breath.

Breath. Holding breath at first, then, gradually; breathing. Breathe. Mysteries ignite movement and then the flow starts again. The torrent torrents with no sense of direction, of where to go, of what is this to be, no . . . writing as flow, writing coming from the multiplicities of Erewhon, nowhere and everywhere and neither or, either nor. Writing with a sense of bodying. A body there. A body on the move. A body there, spectral, presencing, an affective force; a body here wherever that is, body writing, body writing to? Body writing with? Those forces, forcing writing toward . . . toward . . . “mystery” . . . mysteries . . .

He sits with his second coffee, feeling the cushion beneath him slip, a little. He’s not sure why. Mysterious. Talking with Callum has been good. He’s been telling him about the book he’s reading and writing with, Underland. Now he’s back, ready for more. He felt an energy for writing, a sense of writing perhaps, earlier, before his break. As he read, felt, Ken’s writing, the storying of the woman who’s encountered Ken’s writing, encountered Ken there, in the room in the stranger’s house, there was a sense of immersion. And a faint movement. The way writing does that sometimes, seeming to not get anywhere then, somehow, it’s there. He noticed only after, as he moved to get a second coffee.

Always there are the bland predictabilities of inter, the artifice of different Cartesian bodies frictionally engaging in the discomforting rub of the metaphysics of Being, coming together, always not quite. The labor of the artifice active in the production of repetition always animating the appearance, yet again, of the Other.

And then there are the capillary complications and complexities of the intra, differentiation making movement/moments in the volatile meldings and leakages of the unplanned, the play between force and form, the in-formational, the always just around the corner, evolving “by subterranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like a patch of oil” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7).

And with these evolutions there are always the involutions of the always just left behind, the dynamic and animate residues of the infra, the mystery of the images reincarnate in the dream, the freshly emptied wine glass on the desk, the mustiness of strange and exotic perfume drifting from and through those late night undressings, the creased clothes discarded on the floor; the mesmerizing fragments of memory and the longing for those movements in those moments to never dissipate, to never lose their vivid, vibrant, vitality; to never end . . .

There could be, he speculates, a single word for that, for the “involutions of the always just left behind.” Or there should be. Traces, residues. Echoes. None of those do. Like what’s happening now, in this café, the sense of what’s with him, what’s animating. The driftings, the mesmerizings, the longings, in this light, in these movements in Ken’s writing, in “her,” in and around him, the sensing of something more. Presencings, intimatings. Spiritings.

She finished reading and the reading carried on in her head. Reading that gradually suffused within and coursed through the whole of her body. She couldn’t relax. She felt herself shiver. Was it involuntary? Was it the writing? She smiled to herself and voiced, as if there was another in the room, “It was probably both and more-than both.” In doing so, she sensed her body had, at least in part, been infected by the words she had just read. The feeling was more than simply to do with her thinking self. She had noticed people frequently and somewhat casually using the word “visceral” to describe these feelings; she sensed the clichéd quality in this usage. This was not complex enough, far too simple. Her body shifted; these movements showed her it was more than that and yet she was unable to fully express its more than thatness, it was not simply a deep inner feeling to do with her self, no, it felt more like an energy, something being shared; an agentic atmospheric force. She remembered him using the word “affect” in relation to this and she settled with that for a while, still being carried by the words, still unsure about the discomfort she was feeling, moving with it, a sensing with becoming, slightly out of control.

They continue to witness this man at his screen, in this window seat, the sun now casting his shadow across the side wall. He picks up the book once more, holds it, as if to feel its weight, then replaces it on the table. His fingers return to the keys. Only the dregs of the second coffee remain. They shuffle closer. Closer to him, to this, to what is happening, as if it happens somewhere in particular. The man now seems so immersed, so beyond himself, they are confident he will feel no disturbance. They move closer because they must. It’s a compulsion, a drawing in. They read the text he is reading/writing. They hear Callum talking coffee to another customer, one who knows. The two of them are talking about writing. And coffee. There is no traffic outside. There’s a leather jacket draped over the simple wooden chair next to him. They sense someone, her, it must be her, next to them here in this window. Beside them and with him, with this text. Writing happens in immanence.

Closings

She remembered a passage from the book she had been reading. She had annotated the book page and written it down in her notebook. The passage had stayed with her:

. . . sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves . . . And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other. (Tokarczuk, 2022, p. 221)

Thinking these words through again, repeating them and measuring their impact upon her she began to sense the need for something more than what the writing in the passage was saying, what it was providing her with.

After reading his writing she realized that she wanted the writing in the quotation to say more. She wanted it to talk about the foolishness of simply human reasoning. While she sensed the capaciousness in the writing, she was also convinced of the power of words to say more. She moved back to the notebook and the unruly clutter of pages of writing on the desk. She began to think of it less as his writing and more as writing. She shuffled through the intensively marked pages, realizing that some of them were not “his”; in his writing he was writing with, to, alongside of, she didn’t really know, “Jonathan.” The agitation caused by her nervousness, her trepidation about entering this, what seemed like to her, secret private world, now intensified, she was now tentatively peering into a world of co-respondence, the energies of which seemed to be more complicated and mysterious than the world of human reason and exchange that she had read in the quotation she had remembered from Tokarczuk’s book. Drawn, pulled, driven, animated by a chaotic, seemingly whimsical force, she began to read Jonathan’s words as he talked of his experience of reading and re-reading some of Ken’s writing. While the writing seemed to be imbued with a deep sense of friendship between the two writers, what seemed key in all this, what seemed to ring true with her experience of reading, the immersive presencing in taking her senses and lifting her, was Jonathan’s direct expression of multiplicity and agencement, of a force/full/ness much more than two people writing with/to/about each other. The words raced through her . . . “words open, transport, reframe, shift . . . Words like waves . . . their force sweeps over, through . . . They’re not important and yet they feel significant . . . its timing, its surprise—the words actualising at this moment in this way—these are unique, distinctive . . . what makes those words different . . . Yet, they are not what matters, they are not the ‘thing itself.’” They do not “represent.” They are a doing, of affect. An intimating . . .

The sensing of “mystery” of which “Jonathan” had talked, the creative ambiguities and nonrepresentational force of the “hereinthere” that he referred to, all seemed to take on energies of their own, “causing conjugated flows to pass and escape . . . bringing forth continuous intensities for a body-without-organs.” She remembered this quotation from Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 161), a quotation that Ken and Jonathan had encountered when putting Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of haecceity to work, and that Ken often used when trying to move their thinking in action beyond the more than simply human.

Movement seemed to be of its own selfing. Sitting back in the simple wooden chair, needing to relax, she stretched out her arms, with both hands grasped, then held, the edges of the table tightly, sensing the warm light of the morning sun, through the curtains, lighting up the pages lying there before her.