The lecture was called "The Sacred Ordinary" because that was what it had been called when Kallas taught it, and Nadia had not renamed it because renaming it would be a kind of claim she wasn't ready to make.
She had attended this lecture twelve times as a student. She had taken notes, which she still had. She had read everything Kallas published and the two volumes of working notebooks published after her death, and she had thought, when she agreed to teach the course, that she understood what she was inheriting.
She taught it for the first time a year ago. The students were attentive. She made the points she had planned to make. She used the examples she had developed. At the end of the lecture, a student raised her hand and asked: but what does it actually look like? And Nadia had paused, the way Kallas had paused in the recordings, and had said: it looks like this, right now, this, and the student had nodded the way students nod.
She understood, standing there, that she had reproduced the lecture correctly and had not yet found what the lecture was about.
She spent the year between the first and second teaching differently than she had expected. She stopped writing about the concept and started walking to work, which she had not done since she was a postgraduate. She started cooking, which she had not done in years, because meals had been a convenience and now they were something else. She sat in rooms and looked at what was in them.
She was not sure she was getting anywhere. She was not sure what getting anywhere would feel like.
She taught the lecture again last week. She made the same points. She used the same examples. At the end, the same student raised her hand and asked the same question, and Nadia paused again, longer than before.
"It looks like this," she said. "Right now."
She didn't know if it was different this time. The student nodded the same way.
Afterward, walking home, she looked at the pavement and the light and the specific color of the air in March, which was no color at all and completely itself, and she thought: I am in the same place Vera was. I am pointing at the thing I cannot say.
She walked home in the March light, which was not beautiful and was entirely there.