Anna found that she was spending her time in a curious way. She had always read newspapers, journals, magazines in large quantities; she suffered from the vice of her kind, that she had to know what was going on everywhere. But now, having woken late, and drunk coffee, she would sit on the floor of the big room, surrounded by half a dozen daily newspapers, a dozen weekly journals, reading them, slowly, over and over again. She was trying to fit things together. Whereas, before, her reading had been to form a picture of what was taking place all over the world; now a form of order familiar to her had disappeared. It seemed as if her mind had become an area of differing balances, she was balancing facts, events, against each other. It was not a question of a sequence of events, with their probable consequences. It was as if she, Anna, were a central point of awareness, being attacked by a million uncoordinated facts, and the central point would disappear if she proved unable to weigh and balance the facts, take them all into account. Thus, she would find herself staring at the statement: ‘The ignition hazard from the thermal radiation of 10 MT surface burst will extend over a circle of about 25 miles in radius. A fire circle of 25 miles radius encompasses an area of 1,900 square miles and if the weapon detonates near the intended aiming point, will include the most densely populated sections of the target complex which means that under certain clear atmospheric conditions everyone and everything within this tremendous area would probably be subject to a grave thermal hazard and many consumed in the holocaust’ - and now it was not the words that were terrible but that she could not make what they said match imaginatively with: ‘I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.’ So that she would stare at these two sets of words, until the words themselves seemed to detach themselves from the page and slide away, as if they had detached themselves from their own meaning. Yet the meaning remained, unconfirmed by the words, and probably more terrible (though she did not know why) because the words had failed to confine it. And so, having been defeated by these two sets of words, she would put them aside and turn her attention to another set: ‘It is too little realized in Europe that there is no status quo in Africa as it is at present ordered.’ ‘Formality, I think (not, as Mr Smith suggests, a neo-neo-romanticism), may be the coming mode.’ So that she was spending hours sitting on the floor, all her attention focused on selected fragments of print. Soon a new activity began. She carefully cut out the patches of print from newspapers and journals and stuck them on the walls with drawing-pins. The white walls of the big room were covered all over with large and small cuttings from papers. She walked carefully around the walls, looking at the statements pinned there. When she ran out of drawing-pins, she told herself it was stupid to go on with a meaningless occupation; yet she put on a coat, went down to the street, and bought two boxes of drawing-pins and methodically attached the still un-anchored fragments of print to the walls. But the newspapers piled up, landing on her door-mat every morning in a great thick pack of print, and every morning she sat, fighting to order this new supply of material - and going out to buy more drawing-pins.