V2nd, C3

[alice wellintown]

>
> One final note about the closing lines that Laura quoted: "Vision must be the last to go. There must also be a nearly imperceptible line between an eye that reflects and eye that receives." On a literal level, this refers to eyes of the assassinated victim (i.e., there's a point at which the eyes go dead and just reflect light instead of receiving it). But As Laura noted, this is also Stencil's self-reflection (all the sections end with self-reflection, I think), for Stencil has crossed this point. Of course a statue's eyes reflect--and do not receive. But I think that Stencil (or his embodiment) only fully crosses this point at the end of this section.

 On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams ever
kept up. He liked and admired Sumner, but thought his mind a
pathological study. At times he inclined to think that Sumner felt his
solitude, and, in the political wilderness, craved educated society;
but this hardly told the whole story. Sumner’s mind had reached the
calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing
them; it contained nothing but itself. The images from without, the
objects mechanically perceived by the senses, existed by courtesy
until the mental surface was ruffled, but never became part of the
thought. Henry Adams roused no emotion; if he had roused a
disagreeable one, he would have ceased to exist. The mind would have
mechanically rejected, as it had mechanically admitted him. Not that
Sumner was more aggressively egoistic than other senators,—Conkling,
for instance,—but that with him the disease had affected the whole
mind; it was chronic and absolute; while, with other Senators for the
most part, it was still acute.