- It's been a long time since we had an epigraph, folks.
- This chapter kicks off with a long excerpt from Randolph Henry Ash's poem The Garden of Proserpina. Some of these stanzas are ones we've seen before, but here they come together in a way that re-contextualizes the full meaning of the poem.
- In this new context, Ash's poem—full of imagery and symbolism that calls up mythic images of gardens, apples, snakes, and women—seems to be about the nature and significance of poetry itself.
- The chapter itself gets underway as Roland Mitchell returns to the basement apartment that he once shared with Val.
- As Roland walks down the stairs to the door, a neighbor calls out and lets him know that his landlady has had a stroke and has been in the hospital for some time. On top of that, the landlady's countless cats are now running wild.
- As Roland enters the apartment and looks around, he finds a pile of letters waiting for him on the floor. When he reads them, he realizes that he's been offered three separate tenure-track jobs at universities in Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Hong Kong. We guess that kind of thing could still happen in the 1980s.
- Like the Grinch's heart, Roland's self-esteem quickly swells to many times its usual size.
- Roland also finds a letter from James Blackadder, and he reads that one, too. Despite his fears that it'll be angry and accusatory, he finds it courteous and kind. Blackadder has simply written to let him know that the faculties in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Barcelona have been calling to ask about him, and he wants to know how Roland would like him to proceed.
- As Roland thinks about what he should do, he hears strange sounds coming from the door. Soon, he realizes that it's the landlady's cats, scratching to get in.
- Roland decides to curl up with a book, and he sits down with Randolph Henry Ash's Garden of Proserpina.
- As he reads, the narrator muses on the power of reading. Ash's poem comes alive for Roland in a way that it never has before, and it suddenly makes the world come alive in new ways too.
- Roland is experiencing a minor epiphany here. As the novel's narrator explains, he had been trained to believe that language was "essentially inadequate"—never fully able to express what any one person perceives (26.47).
- Suddenly, Roland finds that he's not really interested in this idea anymore. As the narrator puts it: "What had happened to him was that the ways in which it could be said had become more interesting than the idea that it could not" (26.47).
- Roland eventually gets up to get himself something to eat, and when he does he realizes that the cats are still yowling at his door. He decides to let them in and feed them, and soon fifteen cats are eating and purring and rubbing against his legs in his apartment.
- Feeling daring, Roland decides to go out into his landlady's forbidden garden. The cats follow him, and as Roland stands and takes it all in—the garden, the night, the cats—he feels poems coming to him "like rain" (26.51).
- Like never before, Roland suddenly feels alive with artistic inspiration and skill, and can "hear, or feel, or even almost see, the patterns made by a voice he didn't yet know, but which was his own" (26.50).
- Right on.