They stayed in that room for thirty minutes.
She read the placard beside each case completely, which James watched with a patience that didn't feel like waiting. At the second case, she took off her glasses to look more closely at a small, cramped script in the corner of a page, and then forgot to put them back on.
"What does it say?" he asked.
"I can't fully read it. It's a marginal note — a monk wrote it. Maybe twelfth century." She leaned closer. "I think it says something like — 'I am very cold and the candle is going out.'"
James was quiet for a moment. "That's the saddest thing I've ever heard."
"I think it's beautiful," she said. "He just wrote the true thing. In the margin of something enormous and sacred, he just wrote: I am cold and the light is leaving."
She straightened up. She had forgotten, for a moment, that this was a situation she was supposed to be careful about. She had just said an honest thing, and it had come out of her without permission.
James was watching her. Not the manuscript — her.
"Is that what you do?" he asked. "Write the true thing in the margins?"
"What do you mean?"
"In class," he said. "You'd be explaining Hegel or Foucault or whoever, and then suddenly — there'd be this moment where it felt like the lecture was the official text and you were saying something else underneath it. Something real."
She looked at him. It was a perceptive thing to say. It was an uncomfortably accurate thing to say.
"You're describing the entire project of philosophy," she said, deflecting.
"Maybe," he said. "Or maybe just you."
She put her glasses back on.
They sat on the bench in the center of the room. The museum was emptying around them — she could hear the distant sound of other visitors, farther away now, heading toward exits. In here it was very quiet.
He asked her about the book she was writing — she had mentioned it once, briefly, in a seminar, and she was startled that he remembered. She told him about it: a study of the way certain philosophical ideas appeared independently in cultures that had no contact with each other. The same questions, asked in different languages, separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years.
"Like what?" he asked.
"Like — what do we owe each other. What makes a life meaningful. What we do with the fact that we are temporary."
"What do we do with it?"
"That," she said, "is what the book is about."
He smiled. "How long have you been writing it?"
"Three years."
"How long until it's done?"
She laughed despite herself. "That is an aggressive question."
"You said in class that the most useful questions are the ones people are avoiding."
"I was talking about Socrates."
"You were talking about everything."
She looked down at her hands. Outside the room, somewhere distant, a guard called something to a colleague. The museum was beginning its slow end-of-day preparations.
"I don't know when it'll be done," she said, quietly. "Sometimes I think I keep not finishing it because finishing it means I have to say something definitive. And I'm not sure I believe in definitive."
"About the book?" he asked. "Or in general?"
She didn't answer right away.
"Both," she said.