not a conversation, and the truest understanding in the book · S5

The scene's paradox is the theme's one real consolation: this is explicitly not a conversation — both stare into space, Day addresses no one — and yet Kate Gompert keeps finishing his sentences in his own idiom, supplying the shape and the shadow and the rising, speaking his private horror back to him. It is the first time in the novel anyone has answered her in her own language, contact achieved precisely where the ordinary forms of contact (eye contact, address, exchange) are absent. Two people who cannot connect with anyone connect completely by refusing to perform connection.