A baby forgives a still face in minutes. Its body, two weeks later, has not. How much of adulthood is the history of what happened after someone stopped looking back?

We build everything on the crust. The Earth is 84 per cent mantle.

In 1973, Karl von Frisch deciphered the honeybee's waggle dance, where a worker lives six weeks, visits a million flowers, yields one-twelfth teaspoon of honey she never tastes. Like Dickinson's bee jarring across plush tracks to plunder velvet masonry, hers is motion without interval: sweetness becomes signal before it can settle as its own radiance.

A plant leaning toward the window is, at the same moment, gripping harder at the root.

By 1912, the letters between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung had changed. What had begun as intellectually alive, shot through with mutual recognition had begun to curdle. Underneath the careful theoretical arguments, something else was audible. Sue Johnson would have known exactly what she was looking at.

The nervous system, ancient and efficient and not remotely interested in your analysis of it, cannot tell the difference between a pigeon and a person. It only knows that something came before. Something might come again.

An exploration of how disbelief scrapes away not just testimony, but the very legibility of a life; and what it takes to read the faint marks that remain.

They could reason through anything. What they couldn't do was choose lunch.