Final Word

January 20, 1995

This week's Final Word comes from a chemist:

". . . This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of the me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic miniscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one."

The winner of last week's competition, who identified Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past , is Malcolm Scott of Whitstable, Kent.

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