Majahal Quotes

Edward answers Majahal's rose comparison by pointing out that flowers wither. The correction is small and devastating. Majahal has chosen an image of living beauty, then used it as if living things were exempt from change. The aged woman in front of him becomes impossible because the remembered woman was beautiful. Nothing in that reasoning tests her identity. It tests whether time has preserved the appearance he wants. His admiration therefore starts to resemble a refusal to encounter the person at all: a woman can be remembered so insistently that she is no longer allowed to grow older. Edward does not need to dispute that Karin was beautiful. He only needs to restore the part of the rose's life that Majahal has omitted. The grand language cannot survive its own comparison being taken seriously. What sounds like devotion protects an image at the expense of the woman it is supposed to recognize.