Only the vinyl persons, mute and inscrutable, keep their stories to themselves.
Five years later, a reading from his novel duplicates Then We Came to the End's only third-person chapter, an account of inscrutable Lynn Mason's last lonely evening before a mastectomy.
Rather, the victim's whole perspective is given over to that surrogate, to the extent that the only thing that matters to her is pleasing this other person who appears infinitely distant, important, inscrutable, powerful and free.
To the type of person for whom the curious and often inscrutable hits horse race is entertainment, this was tremendously fun to witness.
In person, though, he is quiet, determined and relatively inscrutable.
There follows a list of 10 inscrutable instructions spanning 700-odd words; it would take an average person four minutes to read these out loud.
No sign out front, inscrutable menu and, of course, the holy grail: Am I the only white person in here?
You scroll through your timeline and you get a witticism, then an entreaty to read an essay or column, then a grandstanding denunciation of some phone company's subpar customer service, then an announcement of what a specific person's current jam is, then an accidental insight into some inscrutable private misery.
In short, there is no reason either for one person's salvation or for another person's damnation except the inscrutable will of God: we do not know why some are saved and others damned.
Poorly conceived videos can be as unhelpful as inscrutable text, of course, and no video will fully substitute for an in-person demonstration.
