While I read this piece when it first came out, I was struck, on re-reading, by just how much the mention of time affected me: “I read the weighted decision matrix they used to seed the Sylph AI. I learned to read it. Do you know how long it took me to learn to read it? Nine and a half months, which is some kind of joke I don’t get. The exact duration of bereavement leave, which is another kind of joke that I don’t think is very funny at all, Nanette in HR.” We get an echo of pregnancy in the fact that it took Anna nine and a half months to learn to read the decision matrix, which is also what she was provided as bereavement leave. Grief does not just turn off after that long. Working through such is an ongoing process, likely a never-ending one. Given the inherent aspect of time in my current project, this will doubtless come up. It also reminded me that another text I have on the list for annotating month is Leonard Bernstein’s “Kaddish”, which is based around a Jewish prayer spoken during prescribed mourning periods (thirty days or eleven months, depending on who died).
I’m a total sucker for unique presentations and ergodic literature, and while this piece is a bit too scattered to be much longer than it is, I’ll be taking a lot to heart from this. I’ll just need to make sure I can keep “Seasons” consistent and cohesive.
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