The Blue Rose Manuscript - Always and Forever - Clarity

Clarity: The quality of transparency or purity; the quality of being coherent and intelligible.

[Nowhere in the document is the fact that somebody arranged the pages out of sequence more clear than here. The writing is neat and correct, but labored, betraying a hand still striving to achieve full control of its fine motor functions. There is no doubt the scribe is the same, the markers of the handwriting clearly indicate it. Even the rose seal looks tentative, as if a child had gotten permission to use it and felt overwhelmed by the responsibility and afraid of making a mistake.

This page is illuminated to a much greater degree than the others, a task made easier to accomplish due to the sparseness of the text, which is restricted to the center of the page. It looks like there have been temporary lines to demarcate a box for the content, maybe to help the young scribe maintain clean text edges; there are also lines to keep the writing straight, and the calligraphy clings to them with tormented intensity.

The experience of reading the content of this document presented in the handwriting of an eight or nine-year-old is surreal.

The more I advance into the manuscript, the more this question weighs on me: who was this person who wrote it down? 

She was a woman as far as we can tell, but there are no traces of her passing through this world, outside the conversations included in this manuscript. 

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