All this Gertrude Stein has understood and executed logically because of the perfect simplicity of her mind. Believing implicitly in an absolute, she has not been bothered to doubt the bodily presence of a first principle in her own time. Since she is alive and everybody around her seems to be alive, of course there is an acting first principle, there is composition. This first principle provides a theme for composition because there is time, and everybody, and the beginning again and again and again, and composition. In her primitive good-humour she has not found it necessary to trouble about defining the theme. The theme is to be inferred from the composition. The composition is clear because the language means nothing but what it means through her using of it. The composition is final because it is ‘a more and more continuous present including more and more using of everything and continuing more and more beginning and beginning and beginning’. She creates this atmosphere of continuousness principally by her progressive use of the tenses of verbs, by intense and unflagging repetitiousness and an artificially assumed and regulated child-mentality: the child’s time-sense is so vivid that an occurrence is always consecutive to itself, it goes on and on, it has been going on and on, it will be going on and on (a child does perhaps feel the passage of time, does to a certain extent feel itself older than it was yesterday because yesterday was already to-morrow even while it was yesterday). This is from Miss Stein’s _Saints in Season_: Saint-- A Saint Saint and very well I thank you. Two in bed. Two in bed. Yes two in bed. They had eaten. Two in bed. They had eaten. Two in bed. She says weaken. If she said. She said two in bed. She said they had eaten. She said yes two in bed. She said weaken. Do not acknowledge to me that seven are said that a Saint and seven that it is said that a saint in seven that there is said to be a saint in seven. Now as to illuminations. They are going to illuminate and everyone is to put into their windows their most beautiful object and everyone will say and the streets will be crowded everyone will say look at it. They do say look at it. To look at it. They will look at it. They will say look at it.