But the subtleties of that headshot explain a lot about the subtle difficulties of re-encountering one's own writing. Photographs, it's said, always seem off, because the image they present (horizontally) reverses the image one typically sees in the mirror. The inevitable dissymetries of the human face make this reversal slightly disconcerting. And perhaps this is the best way to explain the differences I find coming to my ink-smudged text on Monday mornings, coming as a reader, no longer approaching from the inside.

Coming as a reader means encountering the peculiarity of text: isolated, stripped of inflection and emphasis; vulnerable to selective reading, selective sight, decontextualization. Stranger than seeing yourself grinning exquisitely in vacation photographs is hearing your own words thrown back against you: "I was reading the other day," a friend begins, "though I forget where..."

Strange as it is, this brings the words full circle. Because the presence of a photograph demands of the text what headlines and ink cannot provide. Pictures give the words an immediacy and a historical presence; no longer disembodied facts, no longer abstract referents, these opinions inhabit particular conjunctions of time and knowledge. As such, they require a response which can only be timely.

Response: the only antidote to the textual impossibility of dialogue. Fame: from the Greek phonei, to speak; famous: to be spoken about. Fame, which takes the written word from its chaste page and breathes life into it. The dream of text: to become speech, imperfect and ink-stained images of itself.

In opinion, in speaking, in fame: so much rests on image, on tone, on touch. This is power beyond what the text can provide. (Bush has courts, Washington, time; I have sentences, capitals, period.) But somewhere in these hypotheticals, somewhere between the shorthand and the puns, between the writing and response, are the beginnings of authority. The space between comma and dash, introduction and headshot, margin and word is space full of promise.

Because, at the end of the day, these are structures on which we all depend - on which discourse itself depends. And mine is one column among many, supporting the edifice.

Maryanthe E. Malliaris '01 is a mathematics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column usually appears on alternate Mondays.