I held a jewel in my fingers

“I held a jewel in my fingers” names Part II and returns as a marker in the book’s later sequence of section titles. The phrase supplies a vivid image, but the available text establishes it chiefly through its placement: it frames a part of the novel rather than identifying a specific action or object within a scene.

Part II and the epigraph

The heading appears immediately before an epigraph attributed to Richard Feynman: “You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.” The juxtaposition sets the image of a jewel held between fingers beside a statement that describes matter through relations and interaction. The evidence supports that formal pairing, though it does not specify a single interpretation of the image.

Recurrence in the section sequence

The phrase appears again in a later list of section headings, where it follows “The mother” and precedes “Sleepwalking.” Its recurrence links the opening designation of Part II to the book’s internal structure. The evidence does not show the phrase being spoken by a character or identify a jewel in the plot; its documented role is as a repeated textual heading.