Speaker 1: Rain against the tall library windows makes a steady, unhurried music.
Speaker 1: I sit in my usual corner, a high bat chair
Speaker 1: with its upholstery sun bleached at the edges, with an
Speaker 1: arm's reach of the battered duck shells that have crowded
Speaker 1: this room since before I was born. The air smells
Speaker 1: as it always does here at a slow drift of
Speaker 1: old pepper, the tine of salt that creeps and from
Speaker 1: the sea even of the window seal, and today a
Speaker 1: faint mineral damp from coats left to dry by the radiator.
Speaker 1: Retirement has given my days a pleasant shapelessness. Some people travel.
Speaker 1: I come here to the public library as I once
Speaker 1: did after skull, seeking neither escape nor adventure so much
Speaker 1: as the famella company of words and the shuffle of
Speaker 1: neighbor's feet in the aisles. I'm browsing the classics, trailing
Speaker 1: slow fingers over cracks blinds, when a cardboard box half
Speaker 1: tucked behind the desk catches my eye, one of those
Speaker 1: innocuous bits of detritus that have never moved and never
Speaker 1: quite belong anywhere. Something not quite bored makes me steep
Speaker 1: for it. Inside a tumble of old checkout cards edge
Speaker 1: is foxed and curling. Most are what you'd expect Dickens,
Speaker 1: Austin Steinbeck, several with my own signature from years ago,
Speaker 1: but then a handful stand out. Their titles make me pause.
Speaker 1: The sky beneath the hill, a recipe for shadows, yesterday's
Speaker 1: lentence odders. I don't recognize this s Palmer E Dorsey,
Speaker 1: Martha Ree. The dates blow backward, some so faded i'd
Speaker 1: need to whit my thumb to make out the ears.
Speaker 1: But in fresher blue ink I see the lipinge of
Speaker 1: Grace Lowther, who still brings a cake to every garden
Speaker 1: club bike sail, A neat, small r talbot Ruth who
Speaker 1: holds cod at the hard west stah See March written
Speaker 1: with the skull to Hou's wobble, now likely grown somewhere
Speaker 1: out there in the world. I can hear the rain,
Speaker 1: the rumble of the heating, the distant cheerful coal of
Speaker 1: someone greeting missque Gardener at the front disk. But inside
Speaker 1: I feel a small prickling uncertainty. I've spent a lifetime here,
Speaker 1: I talk generations of local children to hunt the shells
Speaker 1: for exactly these sorts of books. Yet Not only are
Speaker 1: these three entirely unfamiliar, I was where they never sat,
Speaker 1: on any shelf in his place. A stack of library
Speaker 1: cards shouldn't be unerving. Yet there is something indistinctly impossible,
Speaker 1: delicate and insistent about this tiny heap of recos for
Speaker 1: books nobody seems able to find. I set them in
Speaker 1: a careful row, as a fletting the light, inspect their
Speaker 1: oddness from me. How can a book be check out
Speaker 1: by half a dozen tants for cover decades, yet leave
Speaker 1: not the faintest shadow in my memory, nor any trace
Speaker 1: in the visible shelves. The effect is half amusement, half
Speaker 1: a shiver, the way you feel when a relative insists
Speaker 1: you went on a holiday you cannot recall. I flip
Speaker 1: each card again, searching for some clue, a misfiled author,
Speaker 1: a crooked date, perhaps a catallogious joke. But there is nothing,
Speaker 1: just the undeniable impression under my finger tips of their
Speaker 1: age and use. I slip the cards back into the box.
Speaker 1: The ordinary world to the voices that tappen, computer keys
Speaker 1: returns unchanged. But I can't help glancing now and then
Speaker 1: toward the box, as if the odd titles will resettle
Speaker 1: themselves under my gaze and prove that I imagine the whole thing.
Speaker 1: After all, what are memories and libraries for if not
Speaker 1: to reassure us about what is real? On bad nights
Speaker 1: after my teaching years ended, in especially over the last winter,
Speaker 1: I wondered if the town had forgotten me. Now it
Speaker 1: seems I have stumbled on some thing the town seems
Speaker 1: to have forgotten about itself, or more precisely, something that
Speaker 1: remembers itself all too well, but leaves no proof. The
Speaker 1: public library has long been the center of a small
Speaker 1: seaside town. Not its heart may be, but an essential ventricle,
Speaker 1: pumping quiet energy to the farthest gray cottages and the
Speaker 1: buildbric culdesacs. The building appears grander than it is, Weary
Speaker 1: white columns with a brass on the double doors and
Speaker 1: a line of stained glass windows depict in the sea
Speaker 1: a white light house and a great open book. Even
Speaker 1: the sandstone chips in the winter wind. Inside time, it
Speaker 1: spoils more gently, flows creek and sometimes complained. The shelves
Speaker 1: are height built to suit old fashioned sensibilities and taller generations.
Speaker 1: Ceiling fans far overhead turn with a tied grace. You
Speaker 1: can still smell the salt of the sea here, especially
Speaker 1: on days when a storm lashes the breakwater and the
Speaker 1: wind penetrates a hundred tiny seams. I've lived in this
Speaker 1: town all my life. I know its rhythms as I
Speaker 1: know my own boats setting out before dawn, the bakery's
Speaker 1: first bell before sunrise, the strange hush of main Street
Speaker 1: at three in the afternoon, when everything seems to pause
Speaker 1: but no one stops working faces to I know nearly everyone,
Speaker 1: from toddler's to great grandparents. I live alone these days contently.
Speaker 1: My wife died several years ago. Our children outgrew the
Speaker 1: village and return and flashes holidays and occasions. In retirement,
Speaker 1: the town has become both larger and smaller. I find
Speaker 1: myself a fixture at cafes, always welcome at the counter,
Speaker 1: but rarely interrupted. The library is my anchor, shelter, and
Speaker 1: at times my audience. Missus Gardiner is at the main
Speaker 1: desk today, as she is every day and has been
Speaker 1: for what feels like at least half my life. She
Speaker 1: is unflappable and distracted, and gives impression that she would
Speaker 1: run the world much as she runs her library with
Speaker 1: a cool glance, a precise word, and a deep low
Speaker 1: loft that rattles the filing cabinets. She presides over everything
Speaker 1: and everyone, including Jonah, her assistant at nineteen, with earnest
Speaker 1: glasses and a tendency to hide in the oversize at
Speaker 1: the section whenever a phone rings. The days here have
Speaker 1: a timetable, but not a tyranny. The book club meets
Speaker 1: in the old reference room every Tuesday, the same crowd,
Speaker 1: more or less as when I taught English at the
Speaker 1: secondary school. The doctor jew from the clinic, Ruth Talbot
Speaker 1: from hardware cass still in school and determined to disrupt
Speaker 1: every tradition. We have background, hum's, children's story hour, poetry readings,
Speaker 1: retirees consulting over bridge guides, sometimes a mother, arms full
Speaker 1: of coats, hustling and armado small children from one world
Speaker 1: to fiction into another. Shelves are only partly cataloged. A
Speaker 1: running joke, the Jewy decimal system is a more suggestion
Speaker 1: than law. In our library. Walk through the back rooms,
Speaker 1: I'll find old accession ladgers clapped together with the last
Speaker 1: it bands more ghost than facts. Missess Gardener shrugs off
Speaker 1: any call for stricter order, fish in a berrault. She says,
Speaker 1: you want precise, go to the banked. Here we hunt.
Speaker 1: On any given day, conversations drift toward favorite childhood books,
Speaker 1: first crushes on fictional heroes, the novels that made you
Speaker 1: want to write, a sort of oral tradition. I have
Speaker 1: heard more times than I can count the exact phrase,
Speaker 1: Oh that one change me, or you must read it,
Speaker 1: you must remember it. Everyone has their touch done. But
Speaker 1: nothing in all my ears, not in memory or record,
Speaker 1: resembles the strange musical titles I found in that box,
Speaker 1: not so much as a whisper, not single listen plan
Speaker 1: or summer reading list. I half expect the whole thing
Speaker 1: to unravel with a single question. The next day, I
Speaker 1: catch Massesque Gardener at the desk as she sets out
Speaker 1: a new stack of returns. Have braces clinking, miss Esque Gardener,
Speaker 1: I came across something peculiarly yesterday, old checkout cards with books.
Speaker 1: I couldn't place the recipe for shadows the sky beneath
Speaker 1: the hill. Do you have any idea where there's a shell.
Speaker 1: She doesn't pause, just whips through her receipts. Old there
Speaker 1: are always stray cards. If the books are out, they'll
Speaker 1: come back in their own time, or else they are lost.
Speaker 1: Happens more often than people admit. She peers over her classes, unreadable.
Speaker 1: You know how it is. I press as slightly as
Speaker 1: I can, mention that the date stretch back decades and
Speaker 1: show familiar names. She smiles, this time indulgently. Old libraries
Speaker 1: are full of stray ghosts. Sometimes it's a catalog mistake.
Speaker 1: Sometimes people just make things up to tormentous half the
Speaker 1: town's pranks as grew up, making up new books to
Speaker 1: accidentally check out. It is the expected answer, tangling the
Speaker 1: improbable with the mundane. And yet something in her turne,
Speaker 1: a complicit, almost amuse certainty, makes it clear this is
Speaker 1: not a puzzle for her. The cards don't trouble her
Speaker 1: balance sheet. I leave her to the stack of overgye
Speaker 1: notices and drift into the dimmer reaches of the fiction section.
Speaker 1: If these are austere ghos, surely some material remains a
Speaker 1: misfelt spy, and a shelf label may be a bat
Speaker 1: of copy punch with a with drawn stamp. The stacks
Speaker 1: are quieter here, protected from view by years of rearrangement.
Speaker 1: I kneel patience forced by the slow eag of knees
Speaker 1: tracking each shelf. Nothing, no evidence, not even the ghost
Speaker 1: of a sticky label. I double back to the catalog,
Speaker 1: both digital and handwritten. The new system blinks, no results
Speaker 1: found in the accession register. Here my old careful catalog
Speaker 1: and comes in handy. I scan for gaps. There are
Speaker 1: notes in pencil, pinched into margins, but not a single
Speaker 1: accession number of lines up with the peculiar cards. And
Speaker 1: still the check up box sits on the counter as
Speaker 1: of challenging me prove it belongs. Settling in a chair
Speaker 1: neard a reading room, more out of habit than clarity,
Speaker 1: I absently turn the top card again and again, tracing
Speaker 1: its pedantries ruf Talbot nineteen eighty seven are Talbot two
Speaker 1: thousand three. It is almost about a small reco for
Speaker 1: a book. So when Ruth herself materializes, Cardigan at the elbow,
Speaker 1: pursuit of her eternally misplaced glasses paused, I, since that
Speaker 1: fate is coxing me, Ruth, don't suppose you recall this?
Speaker 1: I hand her the a recipe for shadows card expect
Speaker 1: in fir shark. Yes, she grins, her old mischievous teacher's grin.
Speaker 1: Oh goodness, yes, I love that. My mother read it
Speaker 1: to me one winter, probably the year to tiled the
Speaker 1: school roof. It was about the little girl who learned
Speaker 1: recipes from her neighbor, though they were all well odd.
Speaker 1: I remember the last page. I had a recipe for
Speaker 1: night saucy. Was supposed to whisper before that kind of
Speaker 1: silly now, but it gave me shivers. Then I blink,
Speaker 1: not hiding my surprise. Ruth, are you sure that title?
Speaker 1: That story? I don't recall what ever being here? Of
Speaker 1: course it was. Ruth insists, flipping the card in her palm,
Speaker 1: as if searching for part of her childhood lodged behind
Speaker 1: the typwriton lines not a thick book, may be only
Speaker 1: a hundred pages pale green cover. I think missus Garden
Speaker 1: has prefcessored donated it. She nods, satisfied and claps my shoulder.
Speaker 1: There was even a sequel, wasn't there? I never found
Speaker 1: that one. I want to ask more, but she is
Speaker 1: already off mid memory, joining another conversation at the window.
Speaker 1: I am left with the card in my hand and
Speaker 1: a conviction that something here is more fragile and perhaps
Speaker 1: more peculiar than cataloging error or fadd recollection. Ruth's certainty
Speaker 1: is absolute. I would wager my old teaching mud that
Speaker 1: no such book ever graced these shells, at least not
Speaker 1: since nineteen seventy one, when my own reading began in earnest.
Speaker 1: The contradiction is not subtle, but both missing and undeniably
Speaker 1: present a memory that is shared. Yet, according to all
Speaker 1: evidence impossible that evening, after the last of the rain
Speaker 1: and the sea's hush returns, I prop the U Metton
Speaker 1: cards on my kitchen table and pour myself a short
Speaker 1: glass of local cider. The question is no longer just
Speaker 1: about lost property. How can a butt both belong and
Speaker 1: not belong, remembered in circulation and absent from every shelf.
Speaker 1: It becomes a kind of game, low and looping in
Speaker 1: my mind. Perhaps I missed a year, an addition, a
Speaker 1: clear and sale. Perhaps, as Missess Gardiner implied, it is
Speaker 1: simply a gost to small town bureaucracy that the more
Speaker 1: I puzzle, the less content time to leave it alone.
Speaker 1: Ruth's conviction plans a stubborn seed. I do what I
Speaker 1: have always done, attest the waters. Next Tuesday, the book
Speaker 1: club meets in the meeting room, a lowlitspase that still
Speaker 1: smells faintly of the blackboats that lived here for seventy years.
Speaker 1: I brings naccent. After the first friend of lively argument
Speaker 1: over a dense Russian novel, I casually bring up with
Speaker 1: the Sky beneath the Hill, I keep my tone neutral,
Speaker 1: just curious someone brought up the title recently? Does anyone
Speaker 1: remember it? Doctor jew, who usually says little perks up
Speaker 1: war memoir? Wasn't it about the tunnels in France? I
Speaker 1: remember a chapter about soldier's plain chess under the earth,
Speaker 1: waiting for the all clear, eating liquoruse. She smiles, eyes
Speaker 1: distant cast. The group's youngest member snoughts, that's not what
Speaker 1: it was at all. It's a fantasy. The boy finds
Speaker 1: a cave and climbs down into a whole world under
Speaker 1: the village, a kind of mirror of his own life,
Speaker 1: only brighter. There's a lantern that keeps going out, and
Speaker 1: a ghost who can't make up his mind. Ruth on
Speaker 1: face raises an eyebrow. No, No, it was about the
Speaker 1: ruined abbey on the mower, wasn't it. The conversation quickly
Speaker 1: splits familiar beloved, even heated. Doctor jew insists she lent
Speaker 1: her copy to her brothers, claims the school made her
Speaker 1: class read it, though she adds with the rye grin,
Speaker 1: most of us just took ten summarizing to get out
Speaker 1: of reading it. Ruth pipes up with it in from
Speaker 1: a screen cover, though now it's possibly blue. As the
Speaker 1: discussion swhirls, everyone recalls the version with the conviction descriptions
Speaker 1: to average boy or girl protagonist said in France or
Speaker 1: in the Mullins written by S. Palmer, or maybe it
Speaker 1: was by that author who also wrote the Windmill Book.
Speaker 1: Details grow, shrink change. At one point, doctor Shu vividly
Speaker 1: describes a chapter about eating wild onions in the dark.
Speaker 1: Cass interrupts, remembering a girl who keeps a pet bat.
Speaker 1: Rif files away plot points with the briskness of someone
Speaker 1: telling family history. At least three people recall a character
Speaker 1: named Eliot, though whether he is a dog, a grandfather,
Speaker 1: or secrets by depends on the teller. A few others,
Speaker 1: a pair of retired teachers and a fisherman named Bram,
Speaker 1: admit they remember the title, perhaps, but not much else.
Speaker 1: Wasn't it about the lighthouse keeper's daughter, or there was
Speaker 1: a storm at the end that I do you know,
Speaker 1: vague or detail. The memories accumulate with the kind of
Speaker 1: communal certainty. Each believes fully in their own experience, but
Speaker 1: none are able to produce so much as a doggier
Speaker 1: copy or a remembered passage with the precision of actual text.
Speaker 1: I ask gently if anyone still has their copy. The
Speaker 1: room pauses. There are shrugs, a few puzzled looks, then
Speaker 1: a chorus. If I must have landed, maybe my sister
Speaker 1: has it. I think it was stolen in that flood.
Speaker 1: No one curiously seems troubled by the lack of physical evidence.
Speaker 1: The book books, by all available accounts, exists or existed,
Speaker 1: or maybe just all to have existed. Its precise nature
Speaker 1: seems to change depending on whose memory you consult, as
Speaker 1: though the act of recollection itself reshapes it. Later. I
Speaker 1: try a subtler approach at the Wednesday market, I bring
Speaker 1: up Yesterday's lanterns at a stall selling cut flowers. Is Abel,
Speaker 1: mother to three former students, laughs and says she used
Speaker 1: to read it to her eldest at bedtime. She says
Speaker 1: she cried over the inning. Though press It is unclear
Speaker 1: if the landons belong to children lost in a blizzard
Speaker 1: or wistful fishermen on the bay down at the docks.
Speaker 1: All but mutters half remembered things about waiting for lights
Speaker 1: that never come back, but can't say if it was
Speaker 1: a poem, a play, or a fable. I chart these
Speaker 1: recollections in my note book. There is no unity, and
Speaker 1: yet there is a persistence of stubborn, warm gravity to
Speaker 1: the idea. The same book is variously tragedy and comedy,
Speaker 1: adventure and documentary, as if fulfilling whatever need for narrative
Speaker 1: the speaker carried at the moment. Giona, when I ask,
Speaker 1: reacts with blank confusion. I haven't seen anything like that
Speaker 1: in a catalog. Sometimes things just go missing for years
Speaker 1: then turn up again. A found whole boxes of romance
Speaker 1: novels hidden behind the odies stacks that covers all sun bleach,
Speaker 1: like they hibernated the shrugs. Pushes up his glasses. But
Speaker 1: if we had de batched this old and this well loved,
Speaker 1: we'd have accession numbers for them, or at least stamped
Speaker 1: labels on the shelves. Later in the arch of room,
Speaker 1: I thumb through old accession ledgers, expecting hoping these titles
Speaker 1: might appear there to confirm at least a ghost of
Speaker 1: their existence. A few pencil scribbles, faint and almost apologetic,
Speaker 1: seem to reference the same titles, but they have inconsistent
Speaker 1: call numbers, sometimes even switching author initials. The truly peculiar.
Speaker 1: Some are annotated with withdrawn, while others are clearly enlisted.
Speaker 1: Between perfectly ordinary entries, the marginalia messo still shopless in
Speaker 1: complete cross words, as if locals once sat for a
Speaker 1: while musing. I pour through the drawers here, too, contradictions
Speaker 1: crowd the facts. One half finished note reads in Hurry's
Speaker 1: grip reminds Palmerie over Gwy's lantern. Another entry has a
Speaker 1: grocery list sand which between two title notes. None of
Speaker 1: it feels staged. People spend time with these cards, rode
Speaker 1: on them, but what they grows more or pick the harder.
Speaker 1: I try to read it at home, a cross reference
Speaker 1: everything I've gleaned. The digital catalog offers nothing, and a
Speaker 1: determined search online brings only the titles I already know.
Speaker 1: No reviews, no references, no hints of self published obscurities.
Speaker 1: There's nothing in the indexes of local newspapers, which are
Speaker 1: inselves little more than years of dogged local reporting about
Speaker 1: ferries and rainstorms the community. It is consistent in their inconsistency.
Speaker 1: Each story mutates in transit, expanding or shrinking, but always
Speaker 1: preserves the conviction that the book exists, or once did.
Speaker 1: The physical trace is only in the metadata. In the
Speaker 1: shadow of the ledger and the cattle dog slip, the
Speaker 1: cover colored shift seems micro from one teller to another.
Speaker 1: It it is as if the memory itself is a blossom,
Speaker 1: each mind producing a new, if fatally reminiscent flower. How
Speaker 1: can so many people with overlapping sprecificities and earnest conviction
Speaker 1: recall a thing for which there is no physical trace
Speaker 1: at all except for these cards, These ghostly ledges filed
Speaker 1: as if waiting for the missing volumes to stroll in
Speaker 1: The apologetic overgeebut about book club this week is lively
Speaker 1: than usual. The rain has led up, and the familiar
Speaker 1: faces are crowded. Closer Cass leaning in Ruth with a
Speaker 1: blanket over her knees, Doctor Jue clutching a cup of
Speaker 1: TEA debate is materialized again round a recipe for shadows
Speaker 1: this time, the argument is almost theatrical, a performance of recollection.
Speaker 1: Cass is adamant. It was a ghost story, but not scary.
Speaker 1: A girl mixes ingredients that let her see things at night.
Speaker 1: The neighbor warns her not to finish the last recipe
Speaker 1: or something terrible will happen. Ruth counters instantly, nonsense. It
Speaker 1: to children's book. The recipes are solely invisible biscuits and
Speaker 1: moon sugar. My mother used to make up the last
Speaker 1: one if we were sad before bed. The book even
Speaker 1: had drawings tiny balls and wooden spoons. Brahm idly sipping
Speaker 1: coffee interjects. Didn't have poems about making pictures with candlelight. No,
Speaker 1: says Cass, you're thinking of the later edition. Anne, another
Speaker 1: retired teacher laughs. In our family it was a kind
Speaker 1: of joke. Every one would add a new recipe as
Speaker 1: we read. My boys wrote theirs on the fly leaves.
Speaker 1: The group splits, recalling entirely different episodes, themes, even moral messages.
Speaker 1: Someone insists the heroine his red hair, someone else corrects brown.
Speaker 1: The plot oscillates kaleidoscopic. Every one present is absolutely certain
Speaker 1: of their version. I am left almost dizzy. My own memory,
Speaker 1: no small thing tested daily by crosswood clues, and the
Speaker 1: faces of old students rings empty for every detail. It's
Speaker 1: not a realize, just my memory failing. Everyone's recollection is infuriating,
Speaker 1: the elastic solid for each speaker, reconcilable as a whole.
Speaker 1: No one considers, even for a moment, that the others
Speaker 1: might be wrong. They only assign their difference to maybe
Speaker 1: it was a different edition, or perhaps had borrowed a
Speaker 1: later printing. In the moment, a watch communal memory braid
Speaker 1: itself across the table, no single thread strong enough to bind,
Speaker 1: yet impossible to dismiss the implications threatened to tip out
Speaker 1: of the simplicity I sought to maintain. The phenomenon isn't
Speaker 1: about a lost book, a cattalogging error. It is embedded
Speaker 1: within the fabric of our collective recollection and invention or adaptation,
Speaker 1: or possibly both, shaping itself according to need. The stories
Speaker 1: act as placeholders, ghosts of narratives that could have been,
Speaker 1: should have been, or were remembered exactly as someone wished.
Speaker 1: I think back beyond retirement to when I sat in
Speaker 1: this library after school, listening to the slow winding talk
Speaker 1: of readers in the corners all time is grumbling about
Speaker 1: the books they don't make any more. Tales and local legends,
Speaker 1: abandoned stories of sunken ships, of the school that burned
Speaker 1: down twice in one night, of the lighthouse keeper who
Speaker 1: never left. We repeated them, adjusted them, retrofitted their facts
Speaker 1: as we saw fit, and always in the corner a
Speaker 1: book or two was mentioned. You mustn't read that after dark,
Speaker 1: or best left for a stormy day? Had it always been?
Speaker 1: Thus a pattern of mutually exclusive yet earnestly told stories
Speaker 1: lay down like sediment across the years. I review my notes,
Speaker 1: my mental map of the contradictions. Each memory is detailed, persuasive,
Speaker 1: yet fundamentally I reckons valible with the others. Every fact
Speaker 1: arise wrapped in the certainty of emotion, laughter, nostalgia, sometimes
Speaker 1: a gentle melancholy, while the plot points flowed emerred. How
Speaker 1: are such mutually exclusive memories fostered? Is it a form
Speaker 1: of fouchoor, an innocent by productive of the strange intimacy
Speaker 1: of time life? Could the same mechanism occur in other aspects?
Speaker 1: Family stories, recipes, half remembers of festivals that everyone swears
Speaker 1: happened just at once, I do not know, but the
Speaker 1: cushion has sharpened. The unwritten books are more than lost stories.
Speaker 1: They are living, breathing contradictions of tradition, as thin or
Speaker 1: as thick as the memory of community itself. I decide, quietly,
Speaker 1: but with a new sense of urgency to dig deeper.
Speaker 1: The truth, if such a thing exists, surely lies not
Speaker 1: in the careful facts, but within the structure and limits
Speaker 1: of the stories themselves. Who started it? Are these stories
Speaker 1: deliberate inventions or the emergent effect of decades of shared
Speaker 1: living layered across generations, and more provocatively? Could new ones
Speaker 1: be invented, planted here to see them grow? A week later,
Speaker 1: on a Saturday morning, thick with the smell of breakfast
Speaker 1: drifting from the lunch counter across the street, I find
Speaker 1: myself shelving books beside Jonah. We are deep in the
Speaker 1: biography section. One wedged next to Mandela batter does jackets,
Speaker 1: giving up flakes of old glue. Jonah tries to wedge
Speaker 1: in a stack of autobiography donations, but the shelf is
Speaker 1: too tight. Mind if I move this over, John says,
Speaker 1: putting his shoulder to the shelf, The unit nudges, then
Speaker 1: suddenly shifts further than expected. A stale broth, the smell
Speaker 1: mold perhaps or just older than the last renovation, creeps
Speaker 1: up from the gap. What I first think is an
Speaker 1: old utility cupboard appears behind the books, a flush panel,
Speaker 1: the paint almost exactly matched to the wall, but with
Speaker 1: a faint scene that has not been disturbed in ears.
Speaker 1: Did you know this was here? I ask Jonah, wide
Speaker 1: eyed and delighted, shakes his head. Not in the least
Speaker 1: secret passage. Curiosity propels us. The door sticks, then gives
Speaker 1: with the shutter. We step inside, with a single dim
Speaker 1: bulb revealing the interior. It's less of room than a
Speaker 1: long cupboard, but wider than I guessed. Files, notebooks and
Speaker 1: battered index card's pile atop one another in a half
Speaker 1: pazard order boxes with yellowed masking tape, drawers half open
Speaker 1: revealing sheets of handwritten pages. Thus lays thick enough to
Speaker 1: show our footprints. I reach for a stack of chunky
Speaker 1: catalog notebooks. The first is labeled with Dave Spanning Ranges
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty two nineteen sixty seven, titles for review inside
Speaker 1: a familiar hand Missess Gardiner's predecessor, as Simaise has kept
Speaker 1: an exhaustive list of irregular volumes. A recipe for shadows
Speaker 1: the sky, beneath the hill, Yesterday's landings, each is followed
Speaker 1: by Summer's copious. Often at odds, a books blot is
Speaker 1: sketched out, then a second account annotated by a different
Speaker 1: pen with corrections. No, the girls are redhead or set
Speaker 1: in Devon, not cormal. Sometimes even a third and fourth
Speaker 1: hand piles on the margins, packed with gossip. Askm Reese
Speaker 1: ree sequel or mysteriously Penumber Press nineteen forty eight never
Speaker 1: received copies. The next notebook continues a pattern, sometimes listing
Speaker 1: authobiographies fanciful and surely invented, sometimes tables tracking pending publication dates,
Speaker 1: as if these stories away to delivery from an invisible publisher.
Speaker 1: What is most remarkable, the entries do not fre ease
Speaker 1: in time. All the scripts are sometimes crossed out and updated,
Speaker 1: newing and even recent ballpoint notations commenting on yellowing pencil
Speaker 1: names of townsfolk, some leving, some gone pepper, the margins
Speaker 1: referencing their memories, accounts of lost books, or attempts to
Speaker 1: locate missing coppies. One page, dated nineteen seventy nine references
Speaker 1: a conversation with young J. Marsh my youngest child, unmistakably
Speaker 1: in the same rolling prints she used for all her
Speaker 1: library requests. Other evidence abounds. Dewy numbers are invented, hilarious
Speaker 1: in their audacity. Three hundred ninety two point seven ninety
Speaker 1: three Icelandic dream Liturgy. Some authors are attributed to impossible publishers.
Speaker 1: Pen and P Press nineteen forty eight appears as the default,
Speaker 1: while others are only it self issued. The pending notes
Speaker 1: are sometimes struck through, only to reappear on another page
Speaker 1: years later. It is a catalog not of books, but
Speaker 1: of the memory of books. The documentations of conversations had
Speaker 1: arguments lodged, rumors expanded, every story arguing for its own
Speaker 1: reality through the purely bureaucratic force of documentation. Leafs through
Speaker 1: a box in one country, recipes are listed, each with
Speaker 1: an attribution from doctor Jew's mother out of the old
Speaker 1: vicarage Christmas Pageant Brown remembers this from The Harvest Supper
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three disputed, even the attribution is evident, as
Speaker 1: a debate between penns I sit as much as does
Speaker 1: woll Isle and try to reconstruct a pattern. It comes
Speaker 1: in ripples the realization that the unwritten books are as
Speaker 1: real as the telling makes them. What exists in each card,
Speaker 1: each index is living contradiction. The unwritten volumes persist in
Speaker 1: the notations marginalia and gentle wars of annotation within this room.
Speaker 1: These are not haunted records, but living artifacts of the community, collaborative, generational,
Speaker 1: gently improvised, built across decade, if not centuries. A final
Speaker 1: detail catches my eye in a notebook from the midmen
Speaker 1: as one thousand, nine hundred deties, someone notes plant new
Speaker 1: title next Spring Sea. If club takes debate, cross the
Speaker 1: page in another hand bait. Accept that Ruth now recounts
Speaker 1: dream about green cover book experiments successful. I close the
Speaker 1: notebook at exhale. The unwritten books do not fail to
Speaker 1: exist because the town forgot. They persist because the town,
Speaker 1: layer by layer by year, has remembered them together, argued
Speaker 1: them into being recorded, each contradiction as proof of community.
Speaker 1: The practice is neither strictly intentional nor an accident. Their
Speaker 1: books are the memory project itself, part secret tradition, part game,
Speaker 1: part echo of what a town chooses to recall and
Speaker 1: what it decides to invent. I stand just on my trousers,
Speaker 1: a curiously wheat, a certainty, carving out new space in
Speaker 1: the mind. The truth is larger, richer, stranger than I imagined,
Speaker 1: A tapestry of memory, play and gentle mister, rippling through
Speaker 1: the generations. How did it begin? Who steers it? Now?
Speaker 1: Is there someone somewhere writing the next unwritten book into
Speaker 1: the heart of the town, waiting for us all to
Speaker 1: remember it together? I gather the notebooks enclosed, the hidden
Speaker 1: door behind me, the sea air, and the scent of
Speaker 1: paper swirling in the hall. The library is quite safe
Speaker 1: for the far off shuffle of shoes by the children's coroner.
Speaker 1: The future and the pass quietly into leaving as they do.
Speaker 1: I left the narrow, dust clouded, covered, half crouched, clutching
Speaker 1: the battered notebooks against my ribs, feeling as if I
Speaker 1: discovered not a secret so much as a conspiracy of affection.
Speaker 1: The hush in the library was as soft as ever,
Speaker 1: the only evidence of my revelation as smudge on my sleeve,
Speaker 1: a curl of paper in my hand, and the sensation
Speaker 1: that the room itself drew a deeper breath around me.
Speaker 1: For the next days I found myself transcribing scraps from
Speaker 1: the notebooks, quick nutes and the margins, the contents of
Speaker 1: various check of cards, fish from their card board den
Speaker 1: behind mossess Gardener's counter. I didn't try to make a
Speaker 1: coherent archive. That would have been foolish. Instead, my notes
Speaker 1: grew into odd little maps, lest of names, pulled in
Speaker 1: dates of first appearances for eachum written book, sads at
Speaker 1: charting have versions morphed in the telling. I filled the
Speaker 1: pages mostly with errors and underlyings, sentences that trailed off
Speaker 1: first mentioned was it Ruth or the club as a whole?
Speaker 1: Yet no book says fifth update. Now, with new protogonist
Speaker 1: Bram's ember, I hardly meant to set about proving anything.
Speaker 1: Old habits die hard, though the retired teacher and me
Speaker 1: can't help organizing chaos, hoping for pattern. Soon, everywhere I
Speaker 1: went my ear was tuned to the undercurrent. If someone
Speaker 1: at the bakery reference day lost recipe, or at acquaintance recalled
Speaker 1: a vanished candy shop, I made a note. The impulse
Speaker 1: wasn't just about books any more, but about the texture
Speaker 1: of the t ounds. Remembering looking for structure proved slippery,
Speaker 1: but not fruitless. Certain things stood at once I paid
Speaker 1: enough attention. The unreadow book phenomenon, for all its local peculiarity,
Speaker 1: carried resonances through other parts of communal life. At the
Speaker 1: Methodist Church supper story's bobbed to the surface. Do you
Speaker 1: remember the parade with the goat pulling the bread cart?
Speaker 1: But that was an eighty two? Know that it wasn't.
Speaker 1: At the year the Maze brother brought the dancing bear,
Speaker 1: polite laughter had shaken certainty that no dancing bear had
Speaker 1: ever grace Main Street. Yet it lived in a handful
Speaker 1: of minds, so clearly that no one ever had denied it.
Speaker 1: As with the unwritten books, everyone behaved as if the
Speaker 1: memory were, if not strictly factual, then too beloved to abolish.
Speaker 1: At the gardening Club, several members insisted on recalling a
Speaker 1: prize winning chrysanthemum matt After careful checks of the town
Speaker 1: newsletters fur to archives I approved had never existed. The
Speaker 1: plan the memory persisted anyway. I chatted to friends from
Speaker 1: neighboring villages. When I described the odd titles and their
Speaker 1: living memories, most were amus but uncomprehending. You mean people
Speaker 1: make up a book for fun, or just misremember that'sd
Speaker 1: Margaret from Holmesley, shaking her head fondly in our library.
Speaker 1: If it's not on the shelf, you didn't read it there.
Speaker 1: Memory seemed to run on Rail's titles match physical books,
Speaker 1: and stories about the missing were limited to complaints about
Speaker 1: theft or mismanagement, not intricate debates about vanished plots and
Speaker 1: lyrical green covers. Yet here the boundaries swelled outward, and
Speaker 1: even the most common sensical neighbors permitted the possibility of
Speaker 1: just not remembering where it belonged, even when by all
Speaker 1: evidence it never had. I walked home across the green
Speaker 1: in dusk, unsure whether to be unnerved. My feet kicked
Speaker 1: up salt edge grass along the path as the horizon
Speaker 1: closed in hazy purple. The effect, now seen intentional, or
Speaker 1: at least shaped, a habit woven into the routines of
Speaker 1: the town, passed along in sideway stories and little challenges,
Speaker 1: each generation teaching the next not just what was true,
Speaker 1: but how much play there could be in the telling.
Speaker 1: I did not know all the rules. Perhaps no one did.
Speaker 1: I wondered with a thrill that was neither fear nor Goodness,
Speaker 1: who first decided the library of unwritten books deserved to
Speaker 1: leave a paper trail. The urge to climb backward to
Speaker 1: trace beginnings settled with surprising force. I had dates from
Speaker 1: the notebooks, scores moving back nearly seventy years. I sat
Speaker 1: with Missess god in a late one afternoon, the library
Speaker 1: bellacking down and empty. Hall. Jonah was shelving returns in
Speaker 1: the children's corner. I waited for a lull, and then asked, quietly,
Speaker 1: do you happen to remember how old the tradition is?
Speaker 1: The one with that? I paused, searching for the right phrase.
Speaker 1: She finished my thought the shadow shelf. There was a
Speaker 1: hint of dry amusement in her voice. My predecessor called
Speaker 1: at that shadowshelf. Yes, did she ever tell you how
Speaker 1: it began? Or was always just a present? Missess Gardiner
Speaker 1: leaned her elbows on the desk. She said, there was
Speaker 1: always a bit of playing with records, sometimes to liberty
Speaker 1: know seniors hazen the juniors with nonsense book recommendations, librarians
Speaker 1: inventing titles to catch out of her eager readers. But
Speaker 1: it got more complicated over time. Every few years some
Speaker 1: one would notice a rash of strange checkouts, and every
Speaker 1: one would blame it on children's games or a passing
Speaker 1: fat But it always faded until the next batch of
Speaker 1: memory surface. Did people ever complain. If they did, it
Speaker 1: didn't stick. The town likes having its little seekerts. Besides,
Speaker 1: the only time trouble arose was when folks tried to
Speaker 1: insist there was a right way to remember things. She
Speaker 1: smiled again. Here, disagreement is tradition. I pressed on, So
Speaker 1: you knew about the hidden room the cupboard. I kept
Speaker 1: my tone gentle. Here she surprised me. No flicker of
Speaker 1: guilt or secrecy, but a shrug. Not at first I
Speaker 1: discovered its sorting through old storage charts years back. Left
Speaker 1: it be place needs its roots, ghosts and all. I
Speaker 1: wanted to pursue the metaphor, but held my tongue. She
Speaker 1: was clearly not the architect of the phenomenon. Nor perhaps
Speaker 1: it's only stared A dawned on me that the tradition
Speaker 1: was not marked by ceremony or any fixed methodology. More often,
Speaker 1: the thing spiraled out of spontaneous mischief, communal improvisation, a
Speaker 1: peculiarage to spin the unfindable into being to lay a
Speaker 1: memory at top absence until every one version was partly true.
Speaker 1: That week I visited a handful of elder towns, for
Speaker 1: Comcess Clayborne, who still had a sharp eye for catalog errors,
Speaker 1: for Winfop brothers, whose letters in the village newspaper could
Speaker 1: only be matched by their love for correcting local pup quizzes.
Speaker 1: They remembered dimly being asked as children to find missing
Speaker 1: books for their reading locks. For some it was an
Speaker 1: informal rite of passage. The first time I can same
Speaker 1: here alone, librarian gave me a title, Missess Claibourn recalled
Speaker 1: swore it was on the top shelf, spent the morning
Speaker 1: looking until someone told me it was the initiation. Her
Speaker 1: eyes twinkled with memory and diminished by years. Others recounted
Speaker 1: stories of forging checkouts as a race with siblings who
Speaker 1: could invent the silliest book, and trick of visiting cousin.
Speaker 1: Once an entire class banded together to sign out the
Speaker 1: mass at midwinter, agreeing on plot and character names to
Speaker 1: dupe a substitute teacher, though inevitably each child's version drifted
Speaker 1: by the time school resumed. Some evidence I found in
Speaker 1: a hidden records match these playful anecdotes. Margin eally grew
Speaker 1: specially lively at certain times Midmanus one thousand, nine hundred sixties,
Speaker 1: late eighties, the two years when Nessess Gardiner herself took
Speaker 1: a leave of absence, and by coincidence or not, the
Speaker 1: number of invented titles jumped. I discovered a faded flyer
Speaker 1: in the Archieffer a Lost Book's Night circ in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, where Tansfook were invited to come share memories
Speaker 1: of the booky whish she could find again. Many of
Speaker 1: the unwritten titles appeared in the decorating script, surrounded by
Speaker 1: the little hand drawn lanterns and judils of unreadable spines.
Speaker 1: At the farthest stage of any inquiry, I met only ambiguity.
Speaker 1: Some swore the phenomenon stretched back to the town's founding.
Speaker 1: Others remembered its starting up in school after the war,
Speaker 1: or when television came and ruined everyone's patience for reading.
Speaker 1: Only two things we generally agreed upon. The activity was
Speaker 1: need a secret nor exactly celebrated, a sort of whispering
Speaker 1: game carelessly safeguarded, and with the passage of time it
Speaker 1: became easier to forget which stories were invented for sport
Speaker 1: and which had at least a ghost of actual print
Speaker 1: behind them. Joan approved to be a final unexpected source.
Speaker 1: He grinned at my summary of discoveries and confessed last
Speaker 1: year at a bunch of seniors started swapping the names
Speaker 1: of imaginary horror authors. Next thing we knew those authors
Speaker 1: had hauled back catalogs people claimed to have read. We
Speaker 1: started putting jo Gravy's slips in the returns box. No
Speaker 1: one blinked, you mean it still alive, not limited to
Speaker 1: the old records, very much alive. He should have heard
Speaker 1: the story our kids are arguing last week about which
Speaker 1: edition of the Marble Forest had a twist ending No
Speaker 1: such book in the world, of course, he tilted his head.
Speaker 1: Conspiratorial origin stories is suspect in a place that prefers reinvention.
Speaker 1: The contradiction at the center both spontaneous and self sustaining
Speaker 1: tradition and accident, each instance feeding on the energy of
Speaker 1: whatever the community currently valued remained. The unwritten books were
Speaker 1: neither a prank nor a secret estuary, more like a
Speaker 1: perennial fook art, a shop window continually dressed for whatever
Speaker 1: needs the passer by brought. I nodded to myself the
Speaker 1: act of remembering was at least as important as any
Speaker 1: precise content. Every time someone reached for a title just
Speaker 1: out of reach, or claimed a scene that couldn't be disproven,
Speaker 1: they were not lying. They were collaborating, improvising, rounding out
Speaker 1: the edges of something always under construction, all at once.
Speaker 1: I itched for an experimented teacher's instinct maybe, or a
Speaker 1: linger in urage to draw out the next turning of
Speaker 1: the wheel. If the town's memory could be nudged, I
Speaker 1: wanted to see exactly how soft the boundary really was.
Speaker 1: That Tuesday, I arrived at the meeting room a little
Speaker 1: earlier than usual. The table was still sticky from spelled tea,
Speaker 1: chairs in disarray, paper scattered with reading assignments and ink notes.
Speaker 1: I rummaged in my satchel for a blank check at
Speaker 1: card id appropriated from the box behind the desk, a
Speaker 1: perfectly convincing artifact with the library stamp and invented title
Speaker 1: the w a Une and a plausible author, eh Alt Brent.
Speaker 1: I added a few plausible checkout dates, signed with initials
Speaker 1: that could easily match current patrons and let the cards
Speaker 1: slide into the bottom of thill box. Later, in a
Speaker 1: hidden archive, I talked a note among the catalog entries,
Speaker 1: pending the Wind at nun consider atribution to Missus Claiborne,
Speaker 1: see if it spreads. I took care to see the
Speaker 1: name in subtle conversations, not claiming knowledge, just the tone
Speaker 1: of a stray recollection the Waymissess Gardiner herself may funny
Speaker 1: someone mentioned the Wind at Noon to me the other day.
Speaker 1: Can't say I remember it myself? Was that the worm
Speaker 1: of the dog in the weather station? Or am I dreaming?
Speaker 1: Each time the person on the other en pause, squinted,
Speaker 1: sometimes agreed, sometimes denied knowledge. If any suspected I was
Speaker 1: making mischief, they humored it as a village joke. Three
Speaker 1: days later I overheard Ruth and casst the library coviscounter
Speaker 1: debating whether The Wind at Noon was one of the
Speaker 1: Old School set texts. Ruth adamant that she remembered an
Speaker 1: addition with illustrations by Friday. Someone in the garden club
Speaker 1: recalled reading it to a grandchild. Its details multiplied to
Speaker 1: someone warn the protagonist lost kite and another praise of
Speaker 1: quiet wisdom of its ending, I presented my week's findings
Speaker 1: to Jonah, and on a whim Massa's gardener herself. It
Speaker 1: happened again, I said, only just keeping smile for my voice.
Speaker 1: The book clubs locked in fierce debate over the wind,
Speaker 1: and knew every one certain of its place in their childhood.
Speaker 1: Except as we know, there's no such book outside a card.
Speaker 1: In a phrase or two, Jonah lit up, unfhazed, told
Speaker 1: you it takes barely a nudge sometimes. Missus Gardiner's eyes
Speaker 1: flashed her approval beneath the surface. You're part of it now,
Speaker 1: she said, try to control it and see how much
Speaker 1: life it will have. There At the heart of that
Speaker 1: line was the turn I'd been seeking. My role had changed.
Speaker 1: I was no longer only the observer of the recorder,
Speaker 1: but one of the gardeners of memory, feeding and being
Speaker 1: fed by the gentle machinery that made the unmotten books bloom. Later,
Speaker 1: searching for early traces, I came across a page in
Speaker 1: a decade old notebook nineteen seventy three, Young Jay Marsh's
Speaker 1: story about a Cato trade to places with the weather vane,
Speaker 1: now in circulation as The Cat at the Cross Ones
Speaker 1: lent by father, my handwriting my daughter's nickname. I sat
Speaker 1: awhile with the evidence. The boundary between inventor and audience
Speaker 1: was dissolving. Once I seated a tale, unknowing, egan now
Speaker 1: found it waiting, laid between pages, memory grown into artifact.
Speaker 1: The tradition was not secret bulb, but an enclosed circle,
Speaker 1: always excepting new initiate, accidental or not. There was power
Speaker 1: in the anonymity of its maintenance. Anyone could try. Not
Speaker 1: every friction would catch, but the ones that had lived
Speaker 1: on passed lightly from tello to reader, to librarian and back,
Speaker 1: each hand confident that the others believed. I saw then
Speaker 1: that the phenomenon was self correcting, gently democratic, built upon mischief,
Speaker 1: softened through routine, animated by the pleasure of togetherness that
Speaker 1: comes from the act of collective invention. The only real
Speaker 1: rule was participation in the town's williness to treat memories
Speaker 1: a site to be cultivated, its products tenderly uncertain, I
Speaker 1: listened for it everyone now. At the teacher's lunch, when
Speaker 1: colleagues described curricul on that, upon gentle proving, no one
Speaker 1: could prove or disprove. At the hardware store, where Ruth
Speaker 1: and Bram swapped device based on recollections of repair tips
Speaker 1: from non existent town histories. It was present in old
Speaker 1: church cookbooks, in recipes that no one seemed to have tried,
Speaker 1: yet everyone credited to grand's friend, who must have written
Speaker 1: it for them, all parish fare. It became clear that
Speaker 1: the more widely these stories were aired, the deeper they
Speaker 1: burrowed into acceptance. Shared jokes took on the gravity of tradition.
Speaker 1: A book became as real as the number of people
Speaker 1: able to summon up a feeling, an image, a half
Speaker 1: remembered phrase, even if these ingredients varied with each telling.
Speaker 1: I made a final systematic inquiry. In a single week,
Speaker 1: I invented three more plausible titles, shared them only Aimus Fiz,
Speaker 1: observing how only one enter regular discussion. The others, perhaps
Speaker 1: too strange, faded without a trace. There was no obvious threshold,
Speaker 1: no critical master to guarantee success. Sometimes two acquaintances referencing
Speaker 1: a thing and passing could give it enough momentum for
Speaker 1: others to claim familiarity. Other times even a direct suggestion
Speaker 1: simply vanished. What struck me most forcefully was how little
Speaker 1: anyone seemed to mind the ambiguity. When after a book
Speaker 1: club session, cassickused the group of making up half these titles, doctor,
Speaker 1: she only laughed, encountered that's how stories survived. None of
Speaker 1: us are reading the originals anyway. I asked myself, where
Speaker 1: did the truth end and the work of communal imagination begin?
Speaker 1: Was a difference, even meaningful, I know longer believed it
Speaker 1: was deception, while like a gameplay in plain sight, evolving
Speaker 1: collaborative recast with every telling, there were written books with
Speaker 1: the village or all four call mapped onto ledges and
Speaker 1: catalog slits invisible throughout, connecting the generations more kindly than
Speaker 1: any senses or history. That realization shifted me more than
Speaker 1: I expected. I understood that what mattered wasn't the content
Speaker 1: of any particular novel or cooker call, loss war memo.
Speaker 1: It was the act of performance of remembering together and
Speaker 1: in so doing, revealing both the gaps and the artistry
Speaker 1: of community itself. I watched how the custom maintained more
Speaker 1: than artness dodger. The library became a repository of permission,
Speaker 1: permission to alter memory, to invent, to forgive small errors
Speaker 1: and wide discrepancies, all under the tender fiction of the
Speaker 1: past as we wish it. The manifestations in the ledges
Speaker 1: and cause were less evidence than invitation, a prompt for
Speaker 1: each new generation to join in. The mechanism, then, was
Speaker 1: neither a flaw in record keeping nor retraceable tradition. It
Speaker 1: was a town wide improvisation, an ongoing literary festival, played
Speaker 1: up beneath the routines of daily lending and reading. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the books were forgotten as quickly as they were invented.
Speaker 1: Other times it lingered, gathering stories as a snowball gallows snow,
Speaker 1: until finally they became too knotted to untangle and were
Speaker 1: left occupy that most generous category of all the ones
Speaker 1: we used to love. I could see the human meaning
Speaker 1: clearly enough. The armorate and books were a proof of
Speaker 1: the community's willingness to create collectively, not to deceive, not
Speaker 1: even to amuse, but to conjure soft and forgiving reality
Speaker 1: that honored each need for comfort, adventure, mystery. The details
Speaker 1: of each version, whether pale, green or indigo, with a
Speaker 1: gull or a lighthouse keeper, changed as surely as the
Speaker 1: town's skyline or the tide on the pier. Tradition was
Speaker 1: an act of faith reaffirmed every time someone asked after
Speaker 1: a missing volume or invented the memory of reading it
Speaker 1: beneath the old windows, it became enough for me to
Speaker 1: affirm that the truth was not to be found in
Speaker 1: the accession numbers or the battered catalog slips. Their real
Speaker 1: books might never materialize, the original authors might never have lived.
Speaker 1: But the stories, the conversations, the very memory of their
Speaker 1: existence was the literature of the town. The next Tuesday,
Speaker 1: I returned to book club with a kind of delighted humility.
Speaker 1: The meeting room hummed with laughter, the shuffle of chairs,
Speaker 1: a chorus of voices picking over the preview his week's assignment.
Speaker 1: Rufe was embrold in the argument were cass, who had
Speaker 1: adopted the role of high skeptic, throwing up her hands.
Speaker 1: This cannot be real. You're pulling our leg. There's no
Speaker 1: such book as yesterday's Lanterns. I combed the Catalogum, there
Speaker 1: certainly is, Rufe fired back. He didn't look in the
Speaker 1: right place. Doctor Jux joined in, describing the way a
Speaker 1: certain passage left her in tears. For Am recounted the
Speaker 1: lesson at the inn. He carried three years of rain
Speaker 1: soak fishing trips. No of two recollections matched, but the
Speaker 1: passion in their telling, spelling over with smiles and half
Speaker 1: furness corrections, reminded me of the true product of all
Speaker 1: these Emerton books. If I'd learned anything, it was that
Speaker 1: the community crafted itself in the acts of mutual meandering recollection.
Speaker 1: I did not correct any one. There was no satisfaction
Speaker 1: in revealing the secret. If secret it was anyway to
Speaker 1: clarify with ruin the pleasure set boundaries where the tradition
Speaker 1: delighted in their absence. It was better, I realized, to
Speaker 1: act as participant, to let the performance persist. Every version
Speaker 1: was valid, and every challenge and opportunity for new layers
Speaker 1: new meaning. As the meeting broke up, cast Hern to
Speaker 1: me as narrowed but smiling. He never said if you'd
Speaker 1: read it, did you? I shrugged, imitating my best Missess Gardiner.
Speaker 1: I think I must have, but I'm not sure what
Speaker 1: addition every one else remembers. She laughed, except in the answer.
Speaker 1: I left the library in late afternoon, the scent of
Speaker 1: old books and sierra ahead of me, the lamp of
Speaker 1: the dog casting its familiar halo on main darke and stones.
Speaker 1: The library. I now saw it did not just keep
Speaker 1: the towns past, it endlessly remade it. They are in
Speaker 1: fiction with memory, inviting every new reader, every new teller,
Speaker 1: to write inside the margin. As I walked away, I
Speaker 1: wondered how many other stories genuine touching necessary, just only
Speaker 1: because a few people remember them together, never needing prove
Speaker 1: the act of recalling itself the only record required. A
Speaker 1: gust of went behind me, carried the fin disticko of
Speaker 1: children's laughter, scraps of remembered tales, and I thought that
Speaker 1: the written and unwritten stories grow wild and tangled here
Speaker 1: between the shelves and among friends. That perhaps is what
Speaker 1: memory is for, and that is the end. Thank you
Speaker 1: for listening, and I will see you in the next one.