This Dust of Words

Even at a very young age, Elizabeth Wiltsee was different. Behind her wide eyes and gap-toothed smile lay a prodigious intelligence. With an IQ of 200, she taught herself to read by age four and was reading classical Greek by the time she was ten. At Stanford University, English professor John Felstiner discovered in Elizabeth a deep thinker with the soul of a poet, possessing 'an utterly uncommon voice and sensibility.' Decades later parishioners in a small farming community on the central California coast would find her sleeping in the doorway of their church, homeless and apparently mute. Despite her deepening mental illness and erratic behavior she soon became part of their town, spending her mornings shyly attending Mass, her afternoons in the library perfecting her own translations of ancient Chinese poetry. Then she disappeared. This Dust of Words, whose title is taken from Elizabeth's Stanford honors' thesis, is both a meditation on that final journey and the story of an uncomm