My words never reached him; I could almost hear them drop, one by one, like so many pebbles against a closed window.

One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have 'windows with trees in them.'

I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.

'Why did you fail me? I didn't do nothing!' The reply, of course, is: 'That's just it.'