Q: I understand the fourth and fifth months were particularly trying for Maud.

A: Indeed. During that time she was fed exclusively on case histories of insane persons. It was necessary she be taught to see even the most common objects become "smooth as metal, so cut off, so detached from each other, so illuminated and tense that they inspired terror." [3] It was some time before Maud was her old self again. As a kind of therapy she was tutored in the precipitation of that sequence of recognitions which culminates in what James Joyce called the "epiphany" of an object - when "Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance." Pride in her skill at this sport did much to restore her.

Q: Will you tell us what was the purpose of all this?

A: To enable Maud to design her own objects. Programming was planned to inculcate criteria by which she could select qualities most conducive to numinosity. And it more or less succeeded. Every evening for the past six months she has presented her selections in a succinct recipe describing a single object which I then attempt to realize in my shop.