Nesting DollsdissertationsWatkins, HuntercreatorHunt, LairdAdvisorBrown University. Department of Literary Artssponsor20263, 310 p.born digitalThesis (M. F. A.)--Brown University, 2026thesesEverything has already happened. It sits there like a present, waiting to be unwrapped. When the night opens, step inside. For some people, hearing a language they don’t know is like running an empty blender: just a noise. Like the grinding teeth sound of a car over gravel. Pleasant as birdsong. Or merely another aural hiccup melding into the soundscape: wind on trees, mic feedback, footsteps on pavement, a shallow voice at opera lessons. But for me there’s a sadness, quiet like most sadnesses are. I feel it spreading, reaching toward all my inside spaces, invading with liquid inevitability: a spilled drink on a table, intent on the edge, the closest towel rooms away. So many methods of communication I do not have. I speak, and you hear running water. I’m just here, bathed in limitations. Although, I’m not adept at heading off or resolving miscommunication in languages I do speak. Wouldn’t it be easier to exchange thoughts? But I guess if we do that shouldn’t we just exchange feelings? Shake hands with our thoughts? If I gesture enough, draw with a stick in the sand, paint you a picture, make mating spiders of our hands, cook dinner together, fetch water together, set a glass just right so the sunset is captured inside, unearth vegetables from the purest soil, shake spears at each other, throw them down, interpret each other with any sort of charity at all. We could develop our own language over time. 6,000 languages or something on earth. 6,000 known. Right now. Current. Those are just the ones counted. My approximation of your own approximation of your own approximation. Maybe I misread you or you misread yourself. Never mind the exponents involved with my reply. But this is what we have. Limits of language. All interpretations are misinterpretations, the best only ever getting close, the least accurate translation being the one between thought and speech. If only I could read you. If only the deeper parts were as plain as the pages on your face; if only there was a trapdoor we could take to bring us to the end. Ignore my face, my hands, my posture. Here, this is what I’m trying to say:Postmodernism (Literature)EnglishRPB20260516