"I visit all the Dead, but particularly the…" — Susanna Clarke (#c461)

Card #c461IR // #c461Verbatim excerpt

I visit all the Dead, but particularly the Folded-Up Child. I bring them food, water and water lilies. The House is full of skeletons, the Biscuit-Box Man, the Folded-Up Child, thirteen in all, and Piranesi tends them like a parish priest tends graves. He names them, visits them, feeds them.

— Source: Piranesi (Susanna Clarke)

[Use when]

A text keeps its dead around instead of burying them: they are probably the point.

[Why it matters]

Here death is not a twist but a practice: the dead are company, and tending them is how Piranesi stays human in an infinite house. The skeletons are the previous catalogers, the ones the House kept, including, by implication, everyone Arne-Sayles and Ketterley lured and lost. Piranesi's kindness to the dead is the proof of his epistemology: he treats the vanished the way he treats the living, with attention. The dead are not a mystery to solve; they are neighbors to visit.

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