Mr. Ravitz does not impose meaning on his drips.
There is a fundamental difference between discovering meaning in an object and imposing meaning on it.
In other words, taking photographs is helping Krystle impose meaning on the inexplicable.
None of the other characters has this sort of reverse-engineered psychology, and for good reason: it's a lazy way to impose meaning.
Journeying by foot from Lisbon to Vienna, the elephant Solomon, a curiosity to all who meet him, suffers successive human attempts to impose meaning on what eludes their understanding.
Michael Arad, who is designing the memorial with Peter Walker, said last month, "Any arrangement that tries to impose meaning through physical adjacency will cause grief and anguish to people who might be excluded from that process".
Attempting to impose meaning on the conflict's senseless sprawl, Bartle fastens on a promise inadvertently given to the mother of his friend Murph – younger, softer, less robust – that he would "bring him home".
To the priests and the congregants on Sunday, many attending from other churches or mosques, the victims of the attack were martyrs, or shohada — an Arabic word commonly used here to describe both suicide bombers and their victims, as if to impose meaning on violence that feels empty of meaning.
Essentially, we become our own documentarians and archivists in order to impose meaning on daily life, to show that we are honoring moments with the seriousness we are told they are supposed to possess, and to preserve that honor for posterity.
Still, it is Jorge's death that draws the novel's disparate figures into a sort of causal web, as those who knew him try to impose meaning on this random tragedy by turning it into a question of justice, an attempt to name the party or parties responsible and mete out punishment.
