PAPER AND PENCILS

As she got older though, the scope of her remembering changed. It was not that her memories faded or that the details of what she recalled might be blurred by the passage of time, nor was it that her draughtsmanship grew less precise. It was simply that as time wore on, only part pages, scraps and fragments of text remained in the power of her recall. Indeed as she grew older still, approaching her sixty-fifth year, the fragments of pages, scraps and fragments of pages she could summon in memory got smaller and smaller, month after month. Her final drawing, it is said, made with love, care and a trembling hand on her eighty-third birthday, was simply an impression, deep and black, of a single full stop.

Transmission 2009/10 TE/PM