The phrase, from page 95, “One detaches oneself. One describes,” sums up the chapter quite nicely. The actual ceremony is taking place in this chapter. The way she detaches herself during this time, the way she does often, is through detailed description of what’s around her. She’s not looking at it now because she has her eyes closed; no need, she’s seen it before. I’m sure she’d love to be “out of time” here, but perhaps she’s not able to time travel in this difficult circumstance. So, she describes the canopy bed she and Serena Joy are in. (For the ritual to be complete, a Handmaid must lie on the lap of the Commander’s wife during conception: only this is religiously acceptable in Gilead.) The tone is set by this description. It's like a cloud with rain, a symbol of the fecundity of nature. The canopy above is ethereal, like the stuff of Heaven, but at the same time like matter, the stuff of Earth, like the medium bringing angel babies from Heaven to the material world (though this might be a...