Behind the "incalculable balances", the cruelty of the parent's corrections. Against the improvisations of the child, he bestows a degenerative gift: personhood.
1/ Homage to Leo Marks, WWII cryptographer, and author of the screenplay for Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960).
2/ A shorthand for this vertigo of the unfolding epigram: the experience of an aphorism as it re-engineers the world, whether cruelly, or paternally, in the model sense of the word, as a house-husband delighting the orchid in its pram.