A 861: etext transcription

This is one of a number of late manuscripts in which the opposite sides of the paper appear to constitute separate textual spaces. The fragment beginning "I should think a faded" is one of the many extrageneric texts found among Dickinson's late papers after her death; the fragment beginning "To . . . | might . . . | a climate of" may be related to the first fragment, or, as seems more likely, it may be the remains of a discrete text, preserved only because Dickinson used the other side of the manuscript to jot down another text. The relationship between the fragments, if a relationship beyond a material one exists, is ambiguous and will necessarily remain so: the act of scissoring that rendered a significant part of the fragment on A 861a unreadable also created an unbridgeable textual gap between fragments. Though both texts are composed in a rough-copy hand, subtle shifts in handwriting between them indicate that the fragments are discrete texts. The text "To . . . | might . . . | a climate of" appears to have been thrown onto the page; the reading order is unclear.