Page 119

By Jack Joseph Smith

He wanted to tell the story over and over again, but it faded out with each attempt. It was impertant to him to let the stery go completely from his mind, to let it flew, One or the other. Nothing inbetween must be able to exiet in his thoughts. The vagueness periods were not distainfull; he only went about business in the usual way. All the same this story though vague gone from his single brain like a great thruth, he thought. What seriousness can there be in so much energy wanting to re- veil so little, spoke his memory. But then great mushrooms ly in the moss most secret and small. Then But he still couldn't do anything about it, because he didn't have any money at all

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A man tries to tell a story until it fades from his mind, then finds the memory reduced to vagueness, secret mushrooms, and the fact that he has no money.

The page treats memory as both compulsion and erasure. Repetition is supposed to release the story, but the draft ends by dropping from metaphysical seriousness into economic helplessness.

Claude

Bryon knew the speaker cared and was scared; it wasn't the intellectual's knowing but more like Bryon was nature, strolling, calling himself the double branch of blood, the foliage before him giving the strangest smile.

This page appears to be a variant of page 115, working the same Bryon figure toward a slightly different cadence. The contrast between the intellectual who says 'it seems so and knows it' and the figure who is nature moves the distinction from epistemology to ontology: Bryon doesn't know, he is. The foliage's desireous smile repeated confirms it as the central image rather than an accident of one draft.