Two cycles: their differences and purposes

The opening table offers a compact comparison. In the German Vorspiel, the residency slip beneath a table leg bears the administrative categories through which Hermann has been recorded. Once the slip is lifted, the table becomes unstable. AFW adjusts a piece of card until it supports the furniture. The editors can then look at the document rather than sit above it unknowingly. Register, daughter, Rita, editor, and possible witness name different authorities; none automatically possesses the person. The scene joins classification to physical use without making them identical.

In the English Prelude, Alistair narrates a closely corresponding action from his portrait. He notices the unequal table legs, the slip, the administrative hands, and the competing ways of naming Hermann. He also supplies an aristocratic memory: in his father’s household such paper would have passed to an official accustomed to explaining property. That association does more than provide atmosphere. It shows him recognizing the significance of classification through a practice of management. A sentence may expose the problem while retaining its speaker’s appetite for a world made administratively available.

The placement of the portrait makes the contradiction visible before any abstract explanation. The editors announce that there will be no head of the table. Alistair occupies the wall where, in his account, a fourth man might have sat had they admitted a head. Their arrangement can deny a privileged chair without escaping his narration. Yet his listening does not make Zeitblom look at him. Knowledge and attention remain different powers. The tiny refusal matters precisely because it does not overthrow the narrator’s access.

The English also lets knowledge travel toward an earlier situation. Zeitblom carries copies and tries to reach Julia. A warning cannot be treated as a neutral parcel whose delivery completes responsibility. It asks someone to alter a day, make a judgment, and perhaps assume the burden of preventing another person’s violence. Julia forces that burden into view. The warning can still change events; refusing to turn her life into permanent protective service is not equivalent to refusing information.

These opening differences establish distinct reading practices. The German makes the editorial arrangement visibly answerable to what resists it. The English makes the reader receive that resistance from a voice that claims exceptional access to it. Its precision can be useful and compromising at once. Already the question extends beyond whose statement is correct to who may open a letter, who must respond to a warning, and who gets to decide when someone else’s ordinary purposes should stop.

Passages: German Vorspiel, “Die schlichte Tatsache,” pp. 7–8, and “Was in der Kiste liegt,” from p. 9; English Prelude, “The Plain Fact,” pp. 7–10, and “What Lies in the Box,” from p. 11. The warning’s larger function is discussed in the English Reader’s Guide, p. 9.

The second key is an experiment in permission. Its transfer changes what someone can do, but it does not necessarily remove the owner’s power to suspend the arrangement. The novel needs to distinguish receiving access from acquiring a say in its conditions. That distinction recurs in the public room, in work, and in the painting. An invitation can be generous while leaving the inviter as the only person entitled to define generosity. The German develops this problem through encounters whose practical consequences cannot be absorbed into Hermann’s intention.

Hermann’s identity belongs to this life without being its single explanation. She is an artist, a parent, an heir, and a person whose name and gender are handled differently by official forms and intimate relations. The record’s old classification does not determine who she is. Julia’s familial address does not make every dispute between them an identity dispute. Their disagreements involve care, absence, writing, time, and the right to an independent future. Preserving those multiple relations prevents the protagonist from becoming an allegory whose gender supposedly explains a nation’s history.

Symphony on Canvas intensifies the house’s problem. Giving others meaningful positions within a work may leave its maker with the authority to decide what those positions mean. Removing the represented conductor does not necessarily remove the conducting power. A composition can look plural while retaining a sovereign decision about its whole. The actual cut in the linen gives this objection a material consequence: further making must now proceed with something damaged. The destruction is an action, not merely the announcement of a better aesthetic vocabulary.

The English adds a narrator capable of appreciating the objection. Alistair can admire a challenge to artistic domination without abandoning his own desire to command. This is a sharper test than a confrontation between ethical artists and a villain incapable of understanding art. His intelligence reaches the criticism; his conduct does not follow it. The reader therefore cannot take a perceptive comment on the canvas as proof that its speaker has accepted the limits it demands.

The structure’s first “death” concerns the destruction of a totalizing artistic position. It must remain distinct from Hermann’s later bodily murder. Similarly, the two canvases must not be collapsed into a single emblem of redemption through suffering. A later practice of making begins under altered conditions; it does not retroactively justify what has been lost. The question of where to begin again remains practical: with what materials, in whose company, and under whose authority? The whole cycle is needed because that question has no once-for-all artistic answer.

Passages: German Roman I, “Der zweite Schlüssel,” from p. 51, and the three Leinwand-Zwischenblätter; English Novel I, “The Second Key,” from p. 48, and the corresponding canvas sequence. English Reader’s Guide, pp. 9–10, distinguishes the artistic destruction from the later bodily death.

Alex’s death places both cycles under the pressure of retrospective explanation. Once the reader knows an ending, earlier chairs, notices, journeys, and choices can begin to look like instruments designed only to reach it. The novel’s duration resists that conversion. Alex wants warmth, counts things, makes mistakes, and occupies space among adults. Those circumstances have value before a critic relates him to Mann’s Nepomuk, called Echo. The intertext becomes damaging if it consumes the child’s ordinary existence.

The English warning changes the causal sequence. Muir’s cancellation is genuine; one route is closed and Alistair chooses another. That matters because the recurrence of catastrophe can otherwise be misread as proof that intervention is always futile. A precaution can work in the sense that it changes what an attacker can do, without defeating every subsequent decision by that attacker. Its limited success must remain visible alongside the crime. Responsibility for choosing another route does not migrate to the people who obstructed the first.

The German distinguishes Hermann’s later self-accusation from a narrator’s certified counterfactual. At Roman I, page 534, grief revisits an untried precaution; the telling does not establish that this alternative would certainly have prevented the murder. That distinction protects inquiry without making hindsight omniscient. It remains possible to examine what people did, what they knew, and what precautions were available. It does not follow that a bereaved person’s worst judgment against herself is the authoritative explanation of the death.

Evidence also differs between the cycles. A scar’s resemblance in the German does not amount to conclusive physical identification. The English makes the commission explicit while distinguishing Alistair’s order from Falk’s firing. These are differences in the narrative’s allocation of knowledge, not grounds for merging the two tellings into a repaired police file. The English narrator’s knowledge is not automatically a witness’s knowledge, even when the reader has good reason to accept it within the fiction.

The purpose of the comparison is consequently double. It clarifies agency rather than dissolving responsibility into atmosphere, historical destiny, or artistic necessity. It also protects the finite goods that preceded the crime: an opened door, a warmer coat, a changed arrangement. Alex’s murder does not make those goods imaginary. Neither can they compensate for him. The novels require both judgments to remain available without making one cancel the other.

Passages and commentary: the concluding reading and murder sequences in German Roman I and English Novel I; German Roman I, p. 534; English Reader’s Guide, pp. 10 and 15–16. The current individual volumes control the distinction between resemblance, identification, commission, and firing.

The middle novel is central to the purposes of both cycles because it makes collective action a continuing activity rather than a moral atmosphere around Hermann. A working record is produced, circulated, challenged, and corrected. Circulation requires copying, travel, translation, money, and protection. Each can change the document’s effects. A sheet completed at one table arrives elsewhere among people with different needs and deadlines. The conditions of its use do not wait for its authors to attain intellectual completion.

Anni and Lukas make the limits of an abstract rule concrete. Anni’s need for an escort includes a right to specify its extent and to ask again later. Lukas’s wish to travel without one belongs to different circumstances; employment, lodging, and time have their own pressures. The second case does not refute the first. An escort is neither inherently emancipatory nor inherently paternalistic apart from the person, the danger, the request, and the arrangement. Listening has a consequence only when those differences can change what happens next.

The bathhouse supplies an equally precise limit. In the German scene, Hermann offers more paper; Marta asks instead for someone to take the tubs while she eats. Hermann stays, and Marta eats. Tomorrow’s staffing remains unresolved. The finite benefit is real, as is the continuing institutional problem. Refusing today’s help because it does not solve tomorrow would be perverse; presenting today’s help as full discharge would be evasive. The scene gives political judgment a scale that neither heroic rescue nor an all-or-nothing doctrine of failure can describe.

The English retains this collective density under Alistair’s telling. That retention is indispensable. If everyone became merely the occasion of his commentary, the novel would enact the reduction it criticizes without exposing resistance to it. Instead, people have errands, readers, obligations, and refusals that exceed his preferred account. His ability to describe their motives does not provide him with the room they refuse him. The distinction is enacted through boundaries of access rather than asserted as a general tribute to human mystery.

The counter-record likewise requires more than adding another voice. Julia does not give Alistair’s booklet the standing of testimony merely because it is an alternative account. A statement needs grounds; an omission needs identification; an inference must not pass as something witnessed. A plural composition therefore preserves the possibility of definite judgment. Neither ideological usefulness nor official origin settles truth in advance. The question is what supports the claim and who will bear the cost if it travels uncorrected.

These developments prepare the attraction of state capacity. A tenant can still sleep beneath a leak after Hermann has kept a promise to visit. The movement’s sincerity does not repair the ceiling. Office becomes tempting because it might accomplish something the household and network have not accomplished. That practical lack gives the later bargain its force. The novel need not reduce Hermann to vanity to explain why useful power attracts her; nor need it endorse the bargain merely because the need is real.

Passages: English Novel II, “The Working Record,” from p. 98; “The Pipe Above the Third Floor,” from p. 109; “The Counter-Record,” from p. 209. German Roman II, “Das Rohr über dem dritten Stock,” from p. 119, especially p. 123. English Reader’s Guide, pp. 10–11, explains the circulation sequence and its differentiated obligations.

The offer of office bears a date later than the surrounding pages. Both cycles preserve the discrepancy and then return to the recital. In the German, Adornfeld marks the difference, Julia refuses the chronological smoothing, and AFW leaves the seam visible. In the English, Alistair acknowledges the same seam and announces reasons of his own for bringing office into the room before the music can finish. A shared formal operation thus acquires a different narrating interest.

The scene’s details resist an uncomplicated ascent to national importance. A clerk initially treats Julia as someone who has brought the expected person; she insists that she has come to hear conditions affecting people whose replies she carries. Hermann separates her own answer from the answers she cannot give for rooms she does not own and people she cannot appoint. The offer addresses her as an individual. The preceding novel has made clear why its conditions cannot legitimately be decided by that individual alone.

The papers also distribute different kinds of authority. Proposed conditions are not signed undertakings. A surveillance list is not the same document as the terms being discussed. Julia asks that names and conditions be copied separately and carried in different pockets. This practical separation prevents the apparent unity of “the file” from erasing differences of purpose and risk. Reading carefully here means following what each paper can establish and what carrying it may expose.

The return to the recital prevents the office from becoming the middle novel’s final standard of value. Julia takes her hands from the keys. Someone wants the music to continue; Rita asks that they wait for her. Hermann requests another hearing rather than taking the keyboard. The missing cup, washing, coal, and morning list remain. These are not quaint details added after the serious political scene. They enact claims that political elevation threatens to subordinate.

The fugue’s work is therefore visible in the order itself. A voice enters, interrupts, and yields the reader’s attention to an unfinished earlier activity. The English narrator can retain this return while wanting something different from it. Structural counterpoint supplies the reader with a relation to examine; it does not certify the narrator’s motives. That distinction is one of the most important reasons to read the two versions of this seam together.

Passages: German Roman II, “Das Angebot,” pp. 292–301, and the resumed recital, pp. 301–302; English Novel II, “The Offer,” pp. 261–268, and “The Recital Resumes,” p. 269. No acceptance is entered in either middle volume’s offer sequence.

Novel III intensifies a problem already present in the second key: an arrangement may offer real access while reserving the power to withdraw or redefine it. The scale is now institutional. Hermann’s proposed power to halt an operation is weakened into a halt that needs another signature before it takes effect. The wording can preserve the appearance of a safeguard while changing who can actually stop events. A small alteration in a document produces a large alteration in agency.

The comparison with the movement’s paired authorizations is instructive. Requiring two responsible people can distribute accountability in one arrangement and disable an effective objection in another. The number alone carries no ethical verdict. One must ask whose action needs authorization, whether a refusal can take effect, who controls the second signature, and what happens during delay. This is the practical counterpart to the musical argument: equal positions on a diagram do not settle unequal powers in a room.

The bargain produces benefits. Official paper can secure an inspection that private requests did not obtain. An intervention can avert gunfire while leaving detainees in custody. Such outcomes give the next compromise a plausible argument in its favor. The tragedy depends on taking these gains seriously without treating them as advance authorization for whatever follows. Hermann acquires capacities she lacked; the state acquires uses for her she cannot control. Neither pure vanity nor pure benevolence adequately describes that relation.

The English murder sequence makes the allocation of knowledge unusually explicit. Hermann sees Alistair aim; Alistair narrates firing. Julia hears the shot and then sees and recognizes him lowering the rifle. Her observation is definite but narrower. It must not be enlarged into a claim that she saw the aim and trigger pull. Meanwhile, an official account can exploit a later exchange of shots to call the wound the result of a stray bullet. The narrator’s broader knowledge exposes that maneuver without becoming evidence Julia personally witnessed.

The studio scene sustains care without making it omnipotent. People coordinate cloth, pressure, hands, space, and an urgent need to act. Alistair knows the trajectory they are trying to reconstruct; knowledge has not brought him to the floor to help. Here the English’s governing distinction becomes brutal. The most knowledgeable consciousness is not the most responsible participant. The narrative can give the reader a causal clarity the people in the room lack while making the absence of care unmistakable.

The passage into paint must also remain distinct from bodily survival. Continuing consciousness within the supernatural world does not undo murder. Imaginative death plates are not a forensic description of what those kneeling in the studio could see. The work asks the reader to hold different kinds of truth together without exchanging them. That discipline prevents either the supernatural form or a consoling account of artistic continuation from consuming the injury committed against Hermann.

Passages: English Novel III, “The Stray Bullet,” pp. 221–223, and “The Melting Glass,” from p. 224; the two third novels’ office and safeguards sequences. English Reader’s Guide, pp. 11–12, distinguishes the institution’s benefits, the weakened stopping power, and the limits of witnessed evidence. Hermann’s government office is fictional counterhistory, not an archival claim.

The English cycle makes Alistair literally another bodily life of Adrian Leverkühn within its supernatural construction. The relation is not merely a critic’s analogy. Nor is it a tidy reincarnation beginning only after the earlier body’s death: Alistair’s Scottish childhood overlaps Adrian’s other bodily chronology. That overlap belongs to the fiction’s deliberate difficulty. Correcting it into a conventional succession would remove the condition under which the reader is asked to understand his history.

The inherited positions are reversed. Mann’s artist reaches the reader through a devoted friend’s biography. Here the returned artistic consciousness claims the power to narrate other people. Being the object of an account has become the power to arrange an account. Former suffering, dependence, and cultural achievement give Alistair a past; they do not furnish an exemption from responsibility. His commission of Alex’s murder and his own shooting of Hermann remain actions attributable to him.

Hermann is not Adrian under another name. Her friendship with him and the pressures around her art do not make his biography the proper measure of her existence. The distinction becomes more necessary, not less, when the English establishes a literal connection elsewhere. The temptation to make everything fit a single key is heightened by revelation. The novel answers that temptation by keeping friendship, resemblance, artistic inheritance, and identity across bodies as different relations.

This transformation complicates any simple account of rewriting Mann through a change in the artist’s gender or a more favorable ending. The English relocates narrative power and asks what a former sufferer may choose to do with it. It also denies the reader an easy division between cultivated understanding and brutality. Alistair can remember music and dependence intimately. Those memories can become instruments by which he seeks to restore another person’s service. The evil of that use depends on the remembered relation having been real.

The interpretation has limits. A supernatural identity in Sive’s fiction proves nothing about the historical Mann and does not make musical method, illness, or nationality a source of inherited guilt. Adornfeld’s suggestive name likewise does not turn him into a documentary portrait of Adorno. Intertextual interpretation works by identifying changes in relations and functions, then testing them against passages. It fails when recognition becomes permission to substitute a canonical name for every person the novel has made distinct.

Sources: English Reader’s Guide, pp. 13–14 and 17; English Novel II, “The Mirror-Pair Trial,” pp. 154–155; the two Postludes’ discussions of the withheld friendship. For Mann, the comparison concerns the arrangement of biography in Doktor Faustus, not a historical claim about its author.

In “The Mirror-Pair Trial,” recognition arrives through a bodily habit. Zeitblom moves a chair out of the light before appearing to know he has touched it. He speaks Adrian’s name. Alistair gives him the face known from the portrait and invites him back into a relation organized around musical memory and care. Zeitblom has come with another purpose: finding Falk. Alistair wants the earlier room first. The dispute concerns which real obligation may occupy the present.

When Alistair draws the chair toward himself, Zeitblom begins to steady it and stops his hand. The gesture does not abolish affection. Music beyond the door still draws his attention; the history of care remains susceptible to renewal. On this occasion, however, he asks for the perpetrator’s location and leaves the chair to Alistair. The narrator eventually moves it himself. An ethical change takes the form of an interrupted service and a continued inquiry, not a speech announcing moral recovery.

“The Aschenbach Mirror” later shows the incompleteness of that change. Zeitblom already knows whom he recognized, yet still tries to arrange Hermann through the familiar pattern of a doomed artist. Julia has been given useful appearances without an hour of her own. Correct identity knowledge has not cured a biographical habit. The two scenes together prevent a revelation from becoming the single moment after which the interpreter is reliable.

The German and English therefore differ in more than the amount of information disclosed. The English makes the old relation between artist and biographer a present instrument of pressure under the artist’s own narration. Its later Postlude refers back to the earlier chair recognition; the supper-table discussion concerns the friendship the editors withheld. Treating that discussion as a second discovery would blur the distinction between learning who someone is and changing how one tells another person’s life.

The scene also locates resistance inside an account that does not welcome it. Alistair can narrate Zeitblom’s interrupted gesture accurately, even recording his own discomfort, without endorsing the refusal. The reader sees a purpose that continues beyond the narrator’s preferred arrangement. Such moments are the English’s practical counterpoint: another person’s action remains legible as an action, even though the narrator retains the sentence that describes it.

Passages: English Novel II, “The Mirror-Pair Trial,” pp. 154–155, and “The Aschenbach Mirror,” pp. 225–228; English Postlude, “The Book Not Returned,” p. 23. English Reader’s Guide, p. 14, distinguishes recognition from subsequent editorial disclosure.

Mann’s pact reaches the reader through a document copied and interpreted by Zeitblom. Its stipulated creative term and prohibition on love are already embedded in problems of transmission and belief. Hermann’s self-pact changes the form of postponement: life may begin after the work is finished. That promise can sound protective because it reserves a future instead of openly forbidding one. But unsuccessful work requires another attempt, and successful work generates another condition of completion. The permission keeps receding.

The supernatural confinement remains real. The self-pact is not a psychological explanation that dissolves the painted world or turns Hermann into the sole cause of her captivity. Other agents, offers, editorial decisions, and possibilities of departure matter. The point of comparison is the absence of a finite obligation that can actually be discharged. A life placed perpetually after completion can remain suspended even when particular tasks improve. Stopping will have to mean something more concrete than finally deserving to live.

The Aschenbach material examines a related appropriation through the beautiful image. An account of warmth can omit the fuel and labor that make warmth possible. Julia resists being used as a mirror returning an artist’s desired image. Her own writing cannot simply be promoted as the corrective masterpiece: its readers may miss a sentence, dislike a joke, or reject its ending. Independence includes the right to make work that is difficult, imperfect, and answerable to other readers without becoming someone else’s jurisdiction.

Maria’s painting puts a similar pressure on the fictional Marc. Admiration of women in a conception of creativity is not the same as attention to a particular woman’s making. Hermann’s correction need not abolish friendship to expose that inadequacy. The imagined encounter remains distinct from historical correspondence. The novel may test the limits of a vocabulary associated with a historical artist; it does not thereby produce archival evidence that the conversation happened.

The Postlude brings literary grandeur into contact with a bill, needed rooms, and a departure date. An association with Venice cannot pay a landlady or grant endless use of her space. The humor matters: ordinary obligation is allowed to interrupt canonical gravity. So is the editors’ need to stop working because Frau Klemper has somewhere else to be. Her labor is neither a picturesque background nor a morally superior vocation that she must perform forever. The right to unfinished work includes her right to leave it to someone else.

Sources: English Reader’s Guide, pp. 15 and 17–18; English Novel II, “The Aschenbach Mirror,” pp. 225–228; German Roman II, “Der Aschenbach-Spiegel,” from p. 255; the two Postludes, particularly their third, fourth, sixth, and eighth sections. Mann’s pact is discussed in Doktor Faustus, chapter XXV; the mirror and Venice material also engages Death in Venice.

The German Nachspiel gives its twelve sections to three alternating editorial voices: the Unreliable Editor, Zeitblom, and A Fellow Wayfarer. The English Postlude gives Alistair the narration of the editors’ work. They speak, dispute, remember, and act within his account; they do not become three successive narrators replacing him. That is a decisive formal difference. A shared table and a comparable sequence of sections do not mean the same distribution of narrative authority.

Both endings turn scrutiny upon those who have arranged the novels. The editors withheld Hermann’s friendship with Adrian because they feared it would distort the scale of her life. That fear identifies a real interpretive danger, but suppression is still consequential. In the discussion of the unreturned book, uncertainty about which copy was lent can be retained as a query without erasing the loan itself. Responsible editing distinguishes what is uncertain from what is known rather than treating uncertainty as permission to remove the whole relation.

AFW’s cuts expose a different danger. Resistance to sentimental consolation becomes damaging when it removes Alex’s wet cuffs and thereby loses the practical reason for his place by the stove and what he can see from it. A name can be removed because the critic expects it to promise later plot use. But a person need not earn a name through narrative utility. The refusal of a totalizing account can itself harden into a totalizing rule about what details may remain.

The English makes this self-examination available through Alistair’s continuing narration. His access does not cease when the editors discover their errors. There is no automatic transfer to an ethically purified final voice. Instead, the reader must attend to what their corrections and changed conduct actually achieve inside a telling that remains compromised. The German’s alternation makes the argument among editorial positions more direct; the English tests whether their actions can exceed the use their narrator would make of them.

The last practical decisions concern finite obligations. Frau Klemper leaves; the editors take responsibility for food and washing. “For tonight” is meaningful because it changes their conduct. It does not claim that the whole record is finished, all injury repaired, or the dead compensated. The finite ending of work differs from the endlessly postponed life promised by the self-pact. A person can stop before perfection because another person’s time makes a claim now.

The Möbius return preserves this incompleteness without rendering improvement imaginary. The frame belongs to the world it judges. Continuing within that world does not restore Hermann’s murdered body, erase Alex, or prove a universal doctrine of failure. A hand can remain unburnt; someone can stay longer; someone can leave. Such gains are neither total rescue nor negligible exceptions. Their value depends on allowing a particular improvement to remain particular.

Passages: German Nachspiel, the twelve sections from “Was dazwischen blieb” to “Die Hand, die anfing,” pp. 5–39; English Postlude, sections I–XII, pp. 4–39. For the cut circumstances, compare German pp. 10–14 and English pp. 9–13; for the unreturned book, both p. 23; for the agreements, both from p. 31. English Reader’s Guide, pp. 42–45, maps all twelve sections.

Reading the German first establishes a world whose voices, material arrangements, and editorial disagreements resist being gathered into one authority. The English can then feel like both an enlargement of access and an attempted seizure of that world. Reading the English first begins inside the narrator’s claim; the German can subsequently make other distributions of attention available. Neither order is compulsory. Each cycle should first be allowed its own five-volume movement rather than being broken into a compulsory exercise in alternating languages.

A paired comparison works best at the scale of a definite question. Who handles the residency slip? Who carries a warning? What changes when a recital is interrupted? Which part of a shot does Julia witness? Who narrates the editors’ disagreement? The concordances supply routes to corresponding units, not a warrant to equate every chapter number or to import evidence from one sequence into the other. A discrepancy can be the substance of the comparison rather than an error awaiting repair.

The English’s additional disclosures do not authorize a final account from nowhere. Knowing what Alistair knows may improve the reader’s causal judgment while placing the reader closer to an invasion of privacy. The task is to retain useful knowledge and examine the right claimed in giving it. The German’s plurality, in turn, does not relieve the reader of judgment. Different voices can have unequal evidence; some acts have identifiable perpetrators; an editorial motive can be understandable and still produce a damaging omission.

The purposes meet in the demand that another person’s answer can alter the next action. The German develops the conditions of that answerability across a distributed composition. The English tests its survival under a narrator who can understand the demand while withholding his submission to it. Twelve-tone recurrence gives the reader a memory of changed relations; fugal organization makes competing claims coexist in time; Mann supplies inherited problems whose positions can be rearranged. None of those resources substitutes for the particular scene in which someone shares a key, declines a role, corrects a record, or finally leaves a room.

Sources: English Reader’s Guide, pp. 6–8 and 19; the paired section maps in all four companions. This study uses the individual-volume PDFs dated 5 October 2026. Its readings remain open to argument against the passages, rather than claiming to be the works’ final explanation.