IN THE FIRST VOLUME she published after meeting the Wrist Scholar—the book titled Rooms and Crime—the woman the girl never called mother writes:

The human voice rises when questions are asked, therein adhering the notion of up with the unknown. This logic— unknown is up, known is down—is further perpetrated by the use of upper and lower case in parsing out the difference between specific and general ideas. That the upper case contains the letters we use to denote the grand theories of life such as Death, Fear, and Love further yokes the notion of up with that which is unknown, for the general and abstract—the intangible and fluid—is capitalized not because these terms harbor more significance, but because they will endure as concepts forever defined and redefined, a salve we apply to the wound of mystery.

It is in this way that our notion of unknown is bound to and rooted in up. And it is in this way that the harvesting of knowledge implicitly requires the agent to go down.