Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcaned stories all the time. The lad you
Speaker 1: are here, Let's get into it. The book was a
Speaker 1: stranger among the day's returns, bigger, heavier, and more battered
Speaker 1: than the slain volumes of art history and the hope
Speaker 1: l hardbacks on digital literacy that usually made the morning circuit.
Speaker 1: Its cloth cover was worn almost smooth, the original color
Speaker 1: something between navy and milty, rendered patchwork of stains by
Speaker 1: time and careless hands. The spine bore a call number
Speaker 1: and two layers of faded in itself, nearly rendered eligible
Speaker 1: by a sticker corner that had long ago been removed.
Speaker 1: Beneath both, pressed fatally into the fabric was a gold
Speaker 1: title on Disputed Principles and Devices, below the author's name, E. D. Harrow.
Speaker 1: I'd spend enough years in industrial design, first as an engineer,
Speaker 1: then as a trouble shitter for other people's mistakes to
Speaker 1: recognize shirley work when I saw it. But even at glance,
Speaker 1: this was no slap dust treaders. The binding might have
Speaker 1: gone soft at the edges, the pages yellowed and ballied,
Speaker 1: but the proportions the squared corners in the heavy block
Speaker 1: print all signaled a formal ambition. It was a but
Speaker 1: meant to last by some one who believed in the
Speaker 1: permanence of their ideas. It was a slow warning. Some
Speaker 1: accession was between terms. The stacks droused. I sat behind
Speaker 1: a battered cut at the end of the rare book's wing,
Speaker 1: letting the musty come sink into my joints. Around me.
Speaker 1: The air carried a gentle craft coming from somewhere back
Speaker 1: among the sealed rooms. After a minute, I picked up
Speaker 1: the Herrow volume, pressing down on the stens of call number,
Speaker 1: feeling its resistance inside the front matter confirmed the promise
Speaker 1: published in eighteen eighty seven for Education and the Improvement
Speaker 1: of Inquiry at Edlington Press in Manchester. No less, only
Speaker 1: the forward and the table of contents were typeset. The rest,
Speaker 1: to my surprise, was a tidy but cramped hand, laboriously
Speaker 1: blotting out most white space, and so black it nearly
Speaker 1: gleaned the contents themselves. Seen spars nine chapters on experimental interventions,
Speaker 1: the trials of contradictory phenomena. It tabled results and a
Speaker 1: final one simply concluding devices. But when I turned to
Speaker 1: the first chapter, I felt to napaus The main text,
Speaker 1: for all its pretense, was briefer than I expected, a
Speaker 1: less of materials, assertions about trials, brief promises of further
Speaker 1: elucidation below every few sentences, blocky superscript numbers sent my
Speaker 1: eyes down to footnotes. As long as the main paragraph
Speaker 1: above these footnotes, when mere clarifications or commentary, the unspold,
Speaker 1: meticulous instructions and augued points absent from the body sea
Speaker 1: Fake nine, in which Accombe is demonstrated beyond accidental deviation.
Speaker 1: One insisted further down. Another compared the resistance measured under
Speaker 1: the third trial pp. One hundred ninety two, one hundred
Speaker 1: ninety three to the contradictory outcome in Table A Wall
Speaker 1: Roman three. But there was no figure nine, no Table A,
Speaker 1: no volume rom In three. As far as I could tell,
Speaker 1: this was the only book attributed to Harrow anywhere in
Speaker 1: the Day's Returns, and the next chapters opening paginated straight
Speaker 1: from fourteen to twenty, with nothing in between. For a while,
Speaker 1: I flipped back and forth, searching for diagrams, appended tables,
Speaker 1: or section breaks. Instead, a moonscape of barren margins, brief
Speaker 1: peaks of maintext beside deep valors of densely reference detail
Speaker 1: which footnotes. Somehow, the more I looked, the more elaborate
Speaker 1: the interwoven commentary became, until it threatened to dwarf the
Speaker 1: core argument itself. I wondered if pages had been torn out,
Speaker 1: or perhaps misplaced somewhere in the rebinding process. But there
Speaker 1: were no signs of excision, no rugged edges, no loose
Speaker 1: stitches in the spine, no ghostly shadows where plates might
Speaker 1: once have been pasted and removed. The book was as
Speaker 1: it was last bound, and had perhaps always been. The
Speaker 1: book seemed obsessed with thein scene. This book of experiments
Speaker 1: refined in the supplemental Erada date of found, conclusive in
Speaker 1: volumes not here reproduced, and methodologies presented only to the Academy.
Speaker 1: Each footnote led to another, mapping a landscape of references
Speaker 1: within a texo. Theen as to be nearly absent. If
Speaker 1: I was being honest, it felt less and complete than
Speaker 1: what intent On was holding. By the time the clock
Speaker 1: up of the winchimed the hour, I realized I had
Speaker 1: been stirring at the same two pages for almost fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1: I checked the slips in the back, as if the
Speaker 1: circulation history would solve the riddle. Each holder had signed
Speaker 1: with the range of Viez nineteen eighteen, nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: then nothing until nineteen eighty nine. Most recent was Massess
Speaker 1: Bellamu's uncopperplate dated last week, with her initial sharp and formal.
Speaker 1: I found myself wandering again, as in every puzzling repair
Speaker 1: in my old work, not only what had been left out,
Speaker 1: but why for a book so meticulously present, why go
Speaker 1: to the trouble of mapping an entire architecture of reference,
Speaker 1: only to leave it empty. I closed the volume gently
Speaker 1: and set it aside, a faint tingle of purpose rising
Speaker 1: through my morning gloom. When I brought my collection of
Speaker 1: oddities for cataloging, Missess Bellamy was already hunched at her desk,
Speaker 1: orthopedic shoes tucked precisely under her skirt, spectacles perched so
Speaker 1: close to the bridge of her nose, the hinges all
Speaker 1: but vanished. The piles beside her are one of accession forms,
Speaker 1: one of returned donations, never seemed to shrink, only cycling
Speaker 1: color and labeling. She glanced up as I place Harrow's
Speaker 1: home in front of her emmel another stray from the
Speaker 1: dark ages. Her voice was a mixture of dry sunlight
Speaker 1: and unshakable formality. It was on the return cart I said,
Speaker 1: have you cattaloged it before? She noticed it with the
Speaker 1: tip of a pencil, eyeing the warp, spying with gentle disapproval.
Speaker 1: Likely one of our more enigmatic donations, she said, we
Speaker 1: have dozens, hundreds, perhaps of some orphans, more material than subject,
Speaker 1: less content than chronology. Page is missing, I offered. She
Speaker 1: peered down, leaping swiftly through the volume, then closing it
Speaker 1: with an uncharacteristic tap, as if sealing away the oddness. No,
Speaker 1: people sometimes expect gapt but as I usually say, most
Speaker 1: of these texts were never as linear as one might hope.
Speaker 1: Adenda adenda always more. I must have looked puzzled, because
Speaker 1: she added, they belong here, if anywhere. Some books are
Speaker 1: mostly scaffolding. You know, a skeleton in the shape of scholarship,
Speaker 1: I smiled, though the joke sat on my lips like
Speaker 1: a pebble. She gestured for the accession slapper neatly slid
Speaker 1: the book on to her own categorized shelf, where the
Speaker 1: detritus of centuries waited for some one with the time
Speaker 1: or curiosity to plot their coordinates and a chaos. The
Speaker 1: rare books were in sprawled through three labyrinthine rooms, each
Speaker 1: section by sated by cathedral. Tall shelves of Oku's green
Speaker 1: curl into knotsle like storm clouds, seemed to exist in
Speaker 1: perpetual dusk. The university library as a whole was a
Speaker 1: living palimpsist cram floor gleaming with Tomorrow's technology. The rare
Speaker 1: books wing left mostly to dustin in erection. More haunted
Speaker 1: by the past than curated by This was a world
Speaker 1: of tactile details, the gentle rasp of a cart's wheels
Speaker 1: across ancient carpet, the dry peppers, mell of ink and mold.
Speaker 1: When thows whose diamond pins shivered in their leads were
Speaker 1: never the wind rows. Some shelves grew so tall that
Speaker 1: only the ladders, with their brush rails, permitted even assess
Speaker 1: bellamy dust the upper reaches. The card catalogs here were
Speaker 1: hand written, sometimes in old gem script, sometimes in the
Speaker 1: block capitals of the nineteen twenties clerical tradition into leaf
Speaker 1: cards misletters miscataloged authors, or referenced works transferred missing or pending.
Speaker 1: On one row, I'd found a drawer with a single
Speaker 1: trembling card written entirely in pencil. See also Shelf nineteen,
Speaker 1: Item four, possibly removed in nineteen fifty four. No Shelf
Speaker 1: nineteen remained in the maze of shelving. Interns and professors
Speaker 1: chased their own morosers. Some undergraduates on Fienfield quests would
Speaker 1: dash in on a rumor of a lost letter from Newton,
Speaker 1: treat the rarities as mus or scavenger hunt, and vanished
Speaker 1: just as quickly. Others, older regulars moved through the outlines
Speaker 1: of the stacks like monks. He'd long ago committed every
Speaker 1: piffole to memory. One in particular, Doctor Rum Sen middle
Speaker 1: age theory or physics, subject for whom office hours were
Speaker 1: a polite fiction. Whom senne ambled through the rare books,
Speaker 1: wing almost daily, batting abstractly at the past for applications
Speaker 1: he could mine for a paper, or discussing old disputes
Speaker 1: purely for their charm. I'd met him in my first
Speaker 1: month as a volunteer. He'd asked if anyone had yet
Speaker 1: written a satisfactory history of hyperbolic entropeneus calculations. Then there
Speaker 1: was Leel, a graduate student in library science, sharp but reserved,
Speaker 1: who had somehow appointed herself guardian of the fragile indexes
Speaker 1: and broken my crowfiche Leila seemed to divide her attention
Speaker 1: between digitization work and quietly challenging the metadated conventions of
Speaker 1: centuries old cataloging. Only on the rare occasions when she
Speaker 1: spotted a crucial contradiction would I ever see her truly
Speaker 1: animated routines were everything here my own ran on rails, morning,
Speaker 1: shelving afnians, helping Missess bell Emmy with new donations, intermittent
Speaker 1: help to lead a deciphering palaeography or wrangling legacy date bisfields.
Speaker 1: Every week, someone usually an undergraduate, would show a basking
Speaker 1: for that volume on cold fusion, the one published before
Speaker 1: Cold Fusion existed, or copy of Jewel's letters with the
Speaker 1: MARGINALI you can only read under blue life. The boundary
Speaker 1: between scientific history and campus Foulkhoors was as thin as
Speaker 1: a leaf of onion skin. I like disorder, Unlike the
Speaker 1: noisy and determinacy of engineering oddities here emerged one at
Speaker 1: a time, and with enough time an effort, most could
Speaker 1: be reason through, except Harrow's book. The next day I
Speaker 1: returned to the rare book's wing. The hairrow volumes still
Speaker 1: on my mind. Something about the architecture of its citations
Speaker 1: tugged at me. Lines thrown into empty space. After lunch,
Speaker 1: I retrieved it from Missus Bellamy's shoving pile, ignoring her
Speaker 1: raised ibra. I settled at the same window, light filtered
Speaker 1: through frosted glass, battering the page in soft gold, and
Speaker 1: began to chart footnotes against the opposed targets. The contradictions proliferated.
Speaker 1: Footnotes cross referenced each other in ways that formed lips.
Speaker 1: One would direct me to a scene in note eighteen p. P.
Speaker 1: Fifty four, only to find eighteen, redirecting two steps later
Speaker 1: to an absent diagram clarified in footnote twenty two. Sometimes
Speaker 1: and knot of references would tangle up in a self
Speaker 1: referential spiral. This is merely the preliminary form of the result,
Speaker 1: subject to revision, as by the findings established in the
Speaker 1: missing appendix. Everything invited pursuit and then denied it. The
Speaker 1: specificity both tantalizing and infuriating. I wondered if Harrow was
Speaker 1: some crank, one of those nineteenth century self taught inventors
Speaker 1: who scattered Granio's claims and references like a trail of breadcrumbs,
Speaker 1: confident no one would ever bother to check. But the
Speaker 1: craftsmanship was too precise. Somehow, the footnotes toned pedantic, perhaps
Speaker 1: even Attachedmoker suggested an audience that would be equipped to
Speaker 1: understand if only access to the sight of diagrams or
Speaker 1: volumes could be obtained. By this point, I wanted to
Speaker 1: check not just Harrer's work, but the sources he cited.
Speaker 1: I tried the digital library catalog no luck search and
Speaker 1: consolidated tables of barometric experiments. While three Appendix Roman two
Speaker 1: I received exactly zero returns from any online holdings. A
Speaker 1: generic websitch yielded only pay wal pds of Doctor the Seas.
Speaker 1: Back in the real world, I sought the old Marston Index,
Speaker 1: kept in cold storage beneath the periodicals, now digitized in
Speaker 1: part and just as incomplete. No mention of Harrow, no
Speaker 1: volumes matching the publisher or the supplemental treatise is named
Speaker 1: obliquely in the footnotes. I flagged Dan Leela as he
Speaker 1: transcribe me some Latin titles. You ever see anything like this,
Speaker 1: I asked, holding out the book. She adjusted her glasses
Speaker 1: and flicked through the pages with practice speed. Her eyes
Speaker 1: narrowed slightly, harrow that's not in the main catalog. These
Speaker 1: citations all look fabricated. She held up a hand before
Speaker 1: I could object. I mean, not in the completely faked sense.
Speaker 1: But we've got a few books like this. Mostly it's
Speaker 1: just patting. Authors back then cited one another to sound authoritative.
Speaker 1: If you check, most are dead ends. But these reference specifics, diagrams.
Speaker 1: Surely an author wouldn't invent her, she shrugged. In the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, peer review is piecemeal. You published, you claimed
Speaker 1: what you needed, and by the time anyone challenged your reference,
Speaker 1: the next edition would quietly omit the error. You'd be
Speaker 1: surprised how much early scigns were smoke and mirrors. I
Speaker 1: thanked her and brought the book to Missess Bellamy, who
Speaker 1: offered the professional equivalent of a pat on the shoulder.
Speaker 1: Many of our older holdings of patch those footboats are
Speaker 1: probably just obsolete Citaians best not to loose sleep over them.
Speaker 1: But I did not in the frantic personal way I
Speaker 1: used to let all quotechical mysteries of my evenings, but
Speaker 1: in a lighter, more insistent weaight, as if the book
Speaker 1: itself was daring me to spot its game. Footnotes are
Speaker 1: supposed to clarify, not obscure, I thought, But here they
Speaker 1: erected a whole palace of specificity, experiments, figures, observations where
Speaker 1: no such rooms existed. The contradiction was almost enjoyable, so
Speaker 1: I changed tack. Instead of treating the missing content as
Speaker 1: mere absence, I followed the footnotes as if they were real.
Speaker 1: I made a notebook listing each one, summarizing the supposed content,
Speaker 1: note and cross references, and which the results seemed to
Speaker 1: defy the usual rules. Then I set out to find
Speaker 1: their neighbors. Near Harrow's tomb, I found a shelf of
Speaker 1: science texts from the same era, each bearing layers of
Speaker 1: accession slips, bookmarks, and in several cases more elaborate footnote chains.
Speaker 1: The next run up was to treat his on Light
Speaker 1: Unreversible Processes dated eighteen ninety one, whose furtnotes referenced not
Speaker 1: only diegrounds but entire experiments that could not possibly fit
Speaker 1: within its slen account of pages. One sided, they lost
Speaker 1: appendix on thermal inversion available on consultation. Another more obscure
Speaker 1: advised the reader to compare with the unratified plates item nine.
Speaker 1: In half a dozen books have found the same pattern,
Speaker 1: elaborate for notes leading not just to imaginary diagrams, but
Speaker 1: to unpublished tables lost erada, supplemental data correspondence with the
Speaker 1: name societies, pending reviews, conclusive observations literally know where to
Speaker 1: be found. In nineteen thirties monographam thermodynamics proclaim in footnote
Speaker 1: seven the frost effect, which heat migrates from cold to
Speaker 1: hot under non differentiable conditions, is illustrated involved seventeen appendix
Speaker 1: D with all diagrams extant. I checked no such volume,
Speaker 1: no Appendix D, and no library records indicating any such
Speaker 1: collections had ever circulated. Returning again to Leelah, I asked,
Speaker 1: you mentioned academic bluffing, but the details here theresore deliberate,
Speaker 1: the diagrams, the fonotes crossing into other books, even the
Speaker 1: names too consistent for sloppiness. She balanced two volumes under
Speaker 1: her arm her postuary for it's an art effect of
Speaker 1: how they wrote back then. Self reference made you sound
Speaker 1: like part of a scholarly debate, even if you were alone.
Speaker 1: I doubt any of these false references were meant to
Speaker 1: be actually followed. Doctor room Sen passing by and catching
Speaker 1: the last of my question, grinned. All researchers got it
Speaker 1: wrong all the time. Nineteenth century physics. Half the footnotes
Speaker 1: and nonsense half were scholarly in jokes. My favorite is
Speaker 1: as demonstrated by the experiments in Smidley's revised edition. No
Speaker 1: one's ever found a Smidley or revision. It was, if
Speaker 1: nothing else, a comfort to see that the phenomenon was noted,
Speaker 1: if not worried over. But something in me resisted these
Speaker 1: easy explanations. With my engineers itch for order and mapped
Speaker 1: the pattern in a spiral bound noteok. The footnotes, their recursion,
Speaker 1: the web of references from one book to the next.
Speaker 1: It was less a less than a kind of architectural
Speaker 1: drawing arrows looping back dotted lines, crossing centuries, curving around
Speaker 1: the empty harp of each text. And what nagged at
Speaker 1: me was this the granularity, at the specificity, the feeling
Speaker 1: that these absent experiments, if false or omitted or apocryphal,
Speaker 1: were meant to be chased. Something more complicated than scholarly
Speaker 1: neglect had left these footprints. But to what end I
Speaker 1: couldn't say. I spent the better part of a week
Speaker 1: tracing more footnote trails. There was a kind of thrill
Speaker 1: in each new revelation, since that the rare books wing
Speaker 1: itself harbored not a single mystery, but a word of
Speaker 1: denials and echoes its way, pressing with invisible hands from
Speaker 1: every side. My notebook filled with trails, a footnote in
Speaker 1: one volume withly by author, date or technical tempt, or
Speaker 1: reference in another book across the stacks, and that in
Speaker 1: turn reference yet a third whose claimed supplement no longer existed.
Speaker 1: Once tracing a chain that ran through nineteen eleven volume
Speaker 1: on electro Chemistry, I found a footnote detailing in doctor
Speaker 1: Beckett's negative resissors illustrated in the registered appendices. That phrase
Speaker 1: negative resistance stood out. Curious, I looked for similar references
Speaker 1: in the index, but only more spirals emerred sea appendix,
Speaker 1: registered devices, is seareum sends treaties, fall Roman I none
Speaker 1: captured by any database or shelf. Undergraduate students and visiting
Speaker 1: fellows flooded in an oblivious to my growing obsession. On
Speaker 1: a Tuesday, I joined Missus Bellamy again with a fresh
Speaker 1: pile of footnoted oddities. She sniffed at one. I suppose
Speaker 1: you are assembling a new collection of unresolved problems, she remarked,
Speaker 1: but her tone was more be amused than dismissive. By
Speaker 1: now I was documenting the phenomenon in earnest charting footnotes,
Speaker 1: the claims which one spiraled out of the text into
Speaker 1: loss research which doubled back on themselves recussively. Not just Harrow,
Speaker 1: but a subtle spectrum of authors, each with their own
Speaker 1: strategies for referencing the unseen. It was on Thursday afternoon
Speaker 1: that I stumbled into a new contradiction of physical One
Speaker 1: buried in Harrow's chapter on the atmospheric pressure was the
Speaker 1: reversal of indicated pressure may be easily demonstrated by the
Speaker 1: procedure outlined in foot of twelve, using a paper funnel,
Speaker 1: glass of water, and convex miracy available figures. There were
Speaker 1: no figures, but the materials listed were all on hand,
Speaker 1: scattered about the reading room for displays or maintenance. It
Speaker 1: struck me as enough of an engineering challenge to provide
Speaker 1: a small distraction assembled the apparatuss described glass water, simple
Speaker 1: paper funnel, borrowed mirror. The experiment called for observing a
Speaker 1: barometer reading through the reflection measured as water were slowly
Speaker 1: poured with standard environmental pressure. According to the note, the
Speaker 1: pressure reading should invet when the funnel sage pass a
Speaker 1: certain angle and nabcome. I filed as impossible. Atmospheric pressure
Speaker 1: doesn't reverse. But when I tried it within the quiet
Speaker 1: wood paneled reading room, the barometer needleedst left, then briefly
Speaker 1: fractionally snapped right, just as the footnote predicted. I stood still, stirring,
Speaker 1: then repeated it same anomalous wing. For the third trial,
Speaker 1: I moved the whole set up to the main corridor
Speaker 1: outside the rare book stacks. The results were ordinary, no wiggle,
Speaker 1: no reversal, just the ordinary sway of liquid and needle.
Speaker 1: I brought the equipment back to the original table, this
Speaker 1: time with careful attention. The effect repeated, not dramatic and
Speaker 1: not easily captured on my phone's grainy camera, but there
Speaker 1: impossible according to my training, and yet enacted precisely as
Speaker 1: written in a footnote. I tried a new experiment from
Speaker 1: a different books footnote, something involving placing a mercury thermometer
Speaker 1: against a tipped mankjustup of ambient in the reading room.
Speaker 1: The thermometer, against all logic, colled perceptibly with contact rather
Speaker 1: than warming in the corridor. Nothing. I ran these experiments
Speaker 1: twice more before the hour turned, enough to convince myself
Speaker 1: this wasn't mere equipment error or random variants. Only within
Speaker 1: the rare books wing, more specifically, within the bands of
Speaker 1: the reading room and the oldest stacks did the footnote
Speaker 1: a absurdities manifest. I shared my fe findings in half
Speaker 1: of spertones with Leela, who raised both eyebrows above her
Speaker 1: note book temperature readings going backwards in the reading room.
Speaker 1: She repeated, impossible. He tried it outside the wing twice,
Speaker 1: only happens back here. I felt the familiar twinge of
Speaker 1: self doubt. He never want to be the person reporting
Speaker 1: control to possibilities. Lila frowned, her skepticism shifted, not dismissed,
Speaker 1: but filed our new watch and sy maybe the readings
Speaker 1: are off bad equipment. I showed her the repeated trials.
Speaker 1: Eventually her reluctance softened into thought, you should try other
Speaker 1: footnotes see if any more work. So I did, cautiously methodically,
Speaker 1: always tracking which room, which table, which materials each time
Speaker 1: anomalies clustered within the original parts of the library, never outside.
Speaker 1: It was as if the room itself honored the phantom
Speaker 1: logic embedded in the footnotes, briefly allowing their impossible effects
Speaker 1: to surface. My curiosity overtook any lingering doubts. If these
Speaker 1: footnoted experiments could be enacted to f onely in this space,
Speaker 1: and only in this peculiar way, what did that mean
Speaker 1: for the hundreds of other footnotes leading nowhere? Had any
Speaker 1: one else noticed? My approach shifted. The mystery was no
Speaker 1: longer simply about missing diagrams or apocryphal citations, but about
Speaker 1: the effect of generations worth of references, physical, logical or
Speaker 1: otherwise on what could transpire inside this room. If impossibilities
Speaker 1: could lurk in the scaffolding of these footnotes, perhaps there
Speaker 1: was more architecture yet above and below, a hidden logic
Speaker 1: deep inside the library. Skin with my note, but now
Speaker 1: bristling with experiments failed and successful, I allowed myself to
Speaker 1: circle back to Harrow's book. If the footnotes were not
Speaker 1: simply referencing non existent diagrams, but inviting readers to enact
Speaker 1: the absent, what else might be found were triggered within
Speaker 1: these shelves. I spent the next week investigating further. Upon
Speaker 1: whispering of ardities, Massess Bellamy gracefully deflected, and Doctor Rumsen
Speaker 1: only gladly cautioned in ever or tribute to madness what
Speaker 1: can be explained by humidity and tradition. With each new attempt,
Speaker 1: my fascination grew. It no longer felt like solving a puzzle,
Speaker 1: but more like tracing the rules of a territory that,
Speaker 1: by rights shouldn't exist. One evening, as clouds drew the
Speaker 1: last light through the frosted windows, I found myself drawn
Speaker 1: to a locked cabinet behind Massess Bellamy's desk, a heavy
Speaker 1: glass from with doors that stuck odibly when opened. Missus
Speaker 1: Bellamy had given me a key earlier in the wheat
Speaker 1: for a different errand in a rare moment of indulgence,
Speaker 1: she'd said, if you find anything that needs for furbishing,
Speaker 1: be my guess, but mind the accession order. The bottom
Speaker 1: shelf stalled pamphlets by century thick with dust, the top
Speaker 1: row of anonymous brown bindings with critic mocks Edenda VI
Speaker 1: two A Erada Engineers add a chain of devices nineteen
Speaker 1: o two Handriton one bound only with linen thread, was
Speaker 1: bulky despite its slimness. On closer inspection, I realized it
Speaker 1: was almost entirely composed of the notes, page after page,
Speaker 1: densely packed referencing passages not only within itself but also crossed,
Speaker 1: preferencing other volumes, forming intertwining paths that went threw the
Speaker 1: book and back out again. Curious, I sat down at
Speaker 1: the nearest table, balancing the fragile binding across my knees.
Speaker 1: The footnotes form chains. See footnote eleven, pg. Eighteen for
Speaker 1: commentary on the anomalous prime flicking to eleven every as
Speaker 1: counterdemonstrated in fourth supplement entry seven versible factors in the
Speaker 1: odd prime sea faked three not included. It was a
Speaker 1: ciss um of self referral, ultimately leading not to a
Speaker 1: clarifying origin, but into a kind of infinite regression of strange,
Speaker 1: outdated labyrinth whose substance was all connective tissue, no core.
Speaker 1: Other fruitnetetexts in the Cabinet doubled down on the extraordinary
Speaker 1: marginal notes talked of negative resistance achieved in the reading
Speaker 1: room under particular annotation, entropy reversed in Cocoy's wiring a
Speaker 1: like counterpropagating in the reflection of missing diagraund mathematics volumes
Speaker 1: referenced prime numbers discovered with non integer factist pending review.
Speaker 1: I took one of these volumes, still mostly footnotes, and
Speaker 1: selected a simple experiment, wiring a closed circuit on the
Speaker 1: reading room table as described reversing the current direction a
Speaker 1: measuring voltage. The analog meter patched together but routinely calibrated
Speaker 1: a clicked upward, then impossibly backward. The anomalies could be tiny,
Speaker 1: hairlined deviations, but matched the footnote. Bizarre claianes. Scattered through
Speaker 1: the margins were annotations and varying hands of old fading ink,
Speaker 1: rushed pencil, the blockie, and a lining of library staff
Speaker 1: repeat every five years. One noted marginalia fade effect weakens,
Speaker 1: Another warned one hand recorded see also nineteen twenty two
Speaker 1: tests effect persistsive references maintained the phenomenon echo through more
Speaker 1: than just texts. Seemed all keepers of the library have
Speaker 1: been aware, if only in passing the footnote. A effects
Speaker 1: coat under the right circumstances materialized within these walls. I
Speaker 1: charted the growing web in my private noteook footnote to
Speaker 1: footnote hand notation to annotation. The logic was unmistakable. The
Speaker 1: footnote labyrinth supported a kind of alternate world, as self
Speaker 1: sustaining realm of references where effects other spaces. Although libraries
Speaker 1: could never hope to host, this was more than error
Speaker 1: or overgrown tradition. By the time the last of the
Speaker 1: evening light dimmed, I felt my sense of certainty settle
Speaker 1: quietly into a new spellband register. I stared down at
Speaker 1: my maps, the lines curling, crossing, leaping around the invisible void.
Speaker 1: The library, I now realized, was a machine for inviting
Speaker 1: the impossible. I hid an ecosystem of thinking and annotation
Speaker 1: where the unwritten could, for a moment, almost be I
Speaker 1: closed my notebook, feeling as if I was laying the
Speaker 1: first stone on a vasperridge. For the first time in
Speaker 1: my many years of solving broken systems, I felt less
Speaker 1: like a mechanic and more like an explorer, charting not
Speaker 1: an error but a living structure of possibility. Lea called
Speaker 1: my name twice before I noticed her voice softened the
Speaker 1: evening hush. I looked up from the tangle of our
Speaker 1: rows and notations. Where to cross my notebook and the
Speaker 1: footnote lad and volume. I popped open on the table.
Speaker 1: She hesitated by the reading room threshold, a battered box
Speaker 1: under one arm, and what looked like a ledger pressed
Speaker 1: to her chest. Here here later than usual, she said,
Speaker 1: letting the door side close behind her. The oscillating fan
Speaker 1: shaddered above us, rattling the gas fixtures, the steady drawne
Speaker 1: comforting in its tedium. I was charting, I admit it,
Speaker 1: though I suspected my expression betrayed more all than rigor.
Speaker 1: She accepted this as sufficient, setting down the box and
Speaker 1: drawing a battered chair across the floor. With careft's age,
Speaker 1: we saw our mutual silence, not quite companionable, but certainly complicit.
Speaker 1: I think there's a pattern, I said, voice pitched low,
Speaker 1: as though the stacks might overhear the footnotes, especially the
Speaker 1: recursive ones there, almost like circuits themselves. The more interwoven,
Speaker 1: the more likely something awful happen in this room. Leah
Speaker 1: listened without skepticism, this time, only thoughtfulness. She pulled a small,
Speaker 1: bound loud book from the box and slid it toward me.
Speaker 1: Pages bristled with colored sticky tabs and erratic, leaping handwriting,
Speaker 1: none of it her own marginalia. She said, all mostly
Speaker 1: some from the last twenty years, readers annotating where references
Speaker 1: go nowhere, or the footnotes point at nothing, complaint theory,
Speaker 1: sometimes a little joke. She turned toward a flight page hoofinger,
Speaker 1: lingering on a blunt graphite skull. If any leeberer in
Speaker 1: fines the missing diagram by the next round underneath in
Speaker 1: blue ink, our rejoinder, suppose the diagram finds us first.
Speaker 1: On the opposing leaf, an older hand wrote in faded green,
Speaker 1: do not erase? Absence is instructive. Have you tracked who
Speaker 1: left these? I asked, Running my thumb down columns of
Speaker 1: notations and counter notations, the living pass compressed into margin space.
Speaker 1: The ealer shook her head. No names. I've compared some handwriting,
Speaker 1: but they are all fragments. What stands out though, See here.
Speaker 1: She thumbed to a spread marked in multiple colors, where
Speaker 1: a footnote references applicability and non ordinary media had been overwritten, erased, annotated,
Speaker 1: and at last crossed her with a heavy line. When
Speaker 1: marginally get dense the footnotes themselves, it seemed who she
Speaker 1: greped for a word accrete, power or at least strangeness.
Speaker 1: Have you tested that? I asked, slightly startled, whether annotation
Speaker 1: changes the phenomenon. She smiled at pragmatic graduate student smile.
Speaker 1: I've tested all sorts of things on these volumes. Digital
Speaker 1: notes don't seem to have any effect, but the ones
Speaker 1: written in the book, especially in pencil, some time, make
Speaker 1: a difference, though I can't say how much is suggestion
Speaker 1: and how much is cause. I don't think it's only suggestion,
Speaker 1: I said, and gingerly filled her in on the artiffects
Speaker 1: from the afternoon, the circuit experiment, the biometric reversal, the chilling,
Speaker 1: the moment of all inexplicable save for the holding shell
Speaker 1: of these recurssive referential quigemires. She listened and for once
Speaker 1: said nothing. The silence confirmed were as suspected as skeptical.
Speaker 1: Boundary had shifted from the next table. Theo leaned in.
Speaker 1: I'd nearly forgotten he was there, the undergraduate, obsessed with
Speaker 1: mathematical paradoxes and more perdinently, proof of gaps, he had
Speaker 1: spent the better part of the week extracting book data
Speaker 1: for a term project, periodically peppering Lelo with questions about
Speaker 1: department policies and obscure shelf marks. Did you say something
Speaker 1: about effects only happening in certain rooms? Is foys cut
Speaker 1: cross our low dialog? I hesitated, But leel has not
Speaker 1: emboldened me. Only in original spaces, the oldest reading rooms
Speaker 1: and sacks. That's were the footnotes manifest I suppose his
Speaker 1: eyes widened fractionally. They don't work in the modern wings,
Speaker 1: not with the glass walls or new lighting there. Straight
Speaker 1: and chewing on the idea, Let's check boundaries, he said,
Speaker 1: if there's a spatial pattern, we could map it. He
Speaker 1: RUMs through his butted backpack and drew out a fistful
Speaker 1: of posted notes, snatched a pencil stop from the shared
Speaker 1: desk supply, and started flagging a cluster of pages in
Speaker 1: a book I'd left open. Each note he labeled with
Speaker 1: the present time, type of annotation, and a brief phrase
Speaker 1: tests a cross ref enal. I was too curious not
Speaker 1: to join him. We'll need a control experiment, I said.
Speaker 1: Engineer's imple slotting in the habit, same book, same set
Speaker 1: up here, and then in the next room over ten
Speaker 1: minutes later. Our initial test greud state doubt. We ran
Speaker 1: the footnote circuit in the barometric reversal in three contiguous
Speaker 1: spaces the original reading room. The corridor just passed the
Speaker 1: oak arch and finally beside the catalog terminal in one
Speaker 1: of the modern wings, two anomalies in the first location
Speaker 1: settled but clear nothing outside. In the second, the air
Speaker 1: felt almost expectant, but only produce normal measurements. Theogrin the
Speaker 1: way undergraduates do when the world refuses to be entirely rational.
Speaker 1: It's as if the phenomena have a hard border, he said,
Speaker 1: weave in the thermometer like a divining rod. But why
Speaker 1: does annotation alter anything? Why not proximity? Why about presence?
Speaker 1: We poured over the volumes, cross referencing date stamps and
Speaker 1: staff handwriting, looking for some correlation. Leela, pragmatic as ever,
Speaker 1: wandered aloud. If marginalia can shape or enhance the effect,
Speaker 1: does that mean the whole thing is just embedded tradition.
Speaker 1: Do the rules only persist as long as people play along?
Speaker 1: Not just tradition, I said, thinking of the recursion, the
Speaker 1: echoing architecture of errors nested into errors, or perhaps potential
Speaker 1: into potential. It's more like intellectual attention, like the library
Speaker 1: itself accumulates. In ten THEO took another tact, then let's
Speaker 1: test for performance to get annotate measure or race measure.
Speaker 1: Leave for a few hours, come back. It'll be like
Speaker 1: tracking radio act of half life, only with footnotes. This
Speaker 1: was how the next phase of our inquirium one, a
Speaker 1: spiral in descent into control of confusion. We spent the
Speaker 1: ensuing days sketching flour plans, noting anomaly boundaries, and testing
Speaker 1: each variant in methodical, if sometimes gerrilea fashion. As we worked,
Speaker 1: the library's rhythms folded around us, Missess Bellamy's steady stride
Speaker 1: between accession and reference desks, corraduate students passing in murmured pays,
Speaker 1: visiting faculty, navigating for tangled carts. Not one present, save
Speaker 1: Leelah and THEO, gave more than a passing, not to
Speaker 1: our eccentric endeavors. But when I pressed one or two
Speaker 1: regulars mister gun A noctgenarian who haunted social sciences and Vera,
Speaker 1: the Power Time Classics catalog about oddities or curious effects,
Speaker 1: I got raised ivers A first, and then from gun
Speaker 1: a nonchalant wave old rooms, two strange things. I once
Speaker 1: left a letter here for my wife in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: and had arrived home with her reward a day later,
Speaker 1: goes tradition. Who's to say there meanwhile simply shrugged. Some
Speaker 1: books don't like to be read straight through. It's the
Speaker 1: library's way of keeping the place interesting. No sense of impossibility,
Speaker 1: no superstition. Oddness, yes, but only by grand oddness, the
Speaker 1: kind that cruis to any space older than its current occupants.
Speaker 1: No one owned the mystery. Only those who actively courted
Speaker 1: it were drawn inside back in my notebooks, the patterns multiply.
Speaker 1: The original map of footnote chains had swelled into a
Speaker 1: thicket lines, some fleeting, some deeply recursive, vetching out a
Speaker 1: multi dimensional logic. In the margins of the collection, we
Speaker 1: mapped hotpots for phenomena, never in new walls or reinforced floors,
Speaker 1: always in the oldest word, original plaster, deep ouchos left
Speaker 1: un touched by renovations. Oddly, tests new spaces were modeled
Speaker 1: within the last fifty years were uniformly dead zones. Even
Speaker 1: minor changes a shift to shelf or a repainted wall
Speaker 1: seemed to mute the effect theo. Emboldened by these discoveries,
Speaker 1: theorized allowed one afternoon, as he adjusted a cable for
Speaker 1: another circuit test Suppose the phenomena are added, like each
Speaker 1: notation or footnote as a weight on a scale, and
Speaker 1: at some point the room tips over into something more uporous. Leela,
Speaker 1: who had started to treat the low book like a
Speaker 1: living art of act, shook her head. Where the opposite
Speaker 1: may be. The more attention, the more defined the network,
Speaker 1: people forget or stop bundating the phenomena fade. I watched
Speaker 1: them volly, these two ideas neither right or wrong, the
Speaker 1: tidy binary dissolving in our hands. By now our focus
Speaker 1: had shifted. The contradictions were not only in the books,
Speaker 1: but also in our explanations. If the network of absent
Speaker 1: footnotes was a function of collective attention, then why did
Speaker 1: only a handful of us perceive or care about the
Speaker 1: effects themselves. If spatial boundaries governed the phenomena, then by
Speaker 1: history or purpose, lock these rooms to their improbable logic.
Speaker 1: One gray Wednesday is rain hammered the leaded pains. I
Speaker 1: found myself scouring old accession ledgers in the Cesspelami's office,
Speaker 1: looking for traces of prior scholars who might have chased
Speaker 1: the same threads. Half a dozen yellowed lobooks revealed names,
Speaker 1: some fainty, familiar from family bequests or dedication plaques, but
Speaker 1: with one adult Faraday mk Head Librarian nineteen twenty three
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty initiated reading group on the unwridden Tuesdays, eight
Speaker 1: p m. The record was then no details, just the note,
Speaker 1: but a rush of association came as I flicked through
Speaker 1: the Lopocalila had compiled there squeezed in nearly allegible pencil,
Speaker 1: A marginal note Tuesday examin Lemons, footnotes to nothing, seekers
Speaker 1: of the void, speculative, not superstitious, no names, but the
Speaker 1: date matched. I brought this to Leelah and THEO at
Speaker 1: our command's center. The old north West table sunk between
Speaker 1: the original stacks. Theogrin delighted. So this isn't new. Whole
Speaker 1: generations have played this game. Leelah's lips curved in my appreciation,
Speaker 1: A run table society for chasing gaps in the record
Speaker 1: I supposed to date. We call it a folks group.
Speaker 1: Our next step was clear connected pattern of historical engagement
Speaker 1: to the present phenomena. If documentation and annotation could ignite
Speaker 1: were alter effects, perhaps the raw accumulation of curiosity folded
Speaker 1: and refolded overgenerations had laid something unique into the foundation
Speaker 1: of the library. This idea was less a conclusion than
Speaker 1: a working hypothesis. Facts, after all, were hard to come by.
Speaker 1: But the more we track the phenomena, measured their amplitude,
Speaker 1: mapped the decay at various thresholds, the clearer the pattern became.
Speaker 1: Only the effects that attracted continued speculation that lingered in
Speaker 1: marginalia and cross reference retained any anomalous influence at all.
Speaker 1: The next leap was Steve's. He approached as I finished
Speaker 1: day aating a float job of references on group paper.
Speaker 1: Waving a folded she, I tried copying a recursive footnote
Speaker 1: chained on to a blunt page, just the text, no
Speaker 1: annotation ran the null circuit here with and without the
Speaker 1: coppered page nearby, no weird readings. But when I recopied
Speaker 1: the marginalia as well, not just the footnotes but the
Speaker 1: speculative notes, the crossed added in and then switched to
Speaker 1: the oldest table, got a half tick backward on the meter.
Speaker 1: Told myself it was a fluke. Did again, annotation included
Speaker 1: and got the same blip. Leo broke into laughter out
Speaker 1: of pure delight. A sound that caught me off guard.
Speaker 1: It's the marginalia, she said, phee beck loop. The footnote
Speaker 1: makes the absence visible. The adoptation cements the possibility, I
Speaker 1: pondered aloud. Its like information wants to be realized, but
Speaker 1: it only becomes tangible within this peculiar shell. The unchanged
Speaker 1: physical context plus the intellectual attention couldn't build this from scratch.
Speaker 1: You'd need both the architecture and the centuries of curiosity.
Speaker 1: Over the next days, the pattern replicated, never quite consistently,
Speaker 1: always a little slippery, but enough to show a new rule.
Speaker 1: Every anomally depended not just on the presence of ricus
Speaker 1: o missing references, but on the active physical record of
Speaker 1: readers grappling with those gaps. It was a fragile, temporary ecology.
Speaker 1: In places where marginalia had been a raised, the effect weakened.
Speaker 1: Where fresh notes had recently accumulated, the effect briefly surged.
Speaker 1: We speculated feverishly through lunch hours, catching out glances from
Speaker 1: other patrons, but undeterred at last determined to see whether
Speaker 1: the chain could be deliberately manipulated. Its amplitude increased, its
Speaker 1: boundaries shifted, had devised an experiment using one of the
Speaker 1: most stable anomalous chains, the so called law of chronological inversion.
Speaker 1: In a battered mathematics folio for No. Four points, Evan read,
Speaker 1: a simple pendulum measured in the negative shall reflect the
Speaker 1: anticipated outcome if and only if attended an annotation above
Speaker 1: pre and post oscillations. He fixed none extant the eogrin
Speaker 1: at the challenge, quickly looping all length of string and
Speaker 1: washer from the suppli's box, his hands steady, with the
Speaker 1: accustomed enthusiasm of youth, we placed the rig on the libraries,
Speaker 1: all this marble top stand beneath the only gascon still functional.
Speaker 1: Leal annotated the margin before and after as precisely as
Speaker 1: legibility allowed. I measured stop ortion in hand. The pendulum
Speaker 1: clicked sway, then stalled on for a moment, just as
Speaker 1: the motion seemed about to conclude, reverse ever so slightly
Speaker 1: against the expected arc. Twice more, each time the same
Speaker 1: faint physically and tagable reversal, never outside the annotated context,
Speaker 1: never outside the core room. We left fresh marginalia, returning
Speaker 1: two hours later. The in fact, though faints still echoed.
Speaker 1: Then less on further trials with neither annotation nor attention
Speaker 1: if rapidly faded, we're cultivating possibilities. He ammoveled, wriggling the
Speaker 1: strain in disbelief. We're not discovering physical laws, were tending
Speaker 1: a fragile ecosystem. Leela leaned in brow thoughtful. Maybe the
Speaker 1: point was never about the experiments as such, but about
Speaker 1: the scaffolding. The active inquiry becomes generative, not just interpretive.
Speaker 1: I pushed the idea further. What if this library hosts
Speaker 1: quite literally a realm where all these hypotheses, these fail experiments,
Speaker 1: these improvable assertions become for a flicker, almost real, not
Speaker 1: because of what they claim, but because generations have chased
Speaker 1: their meaning in good faith, annotating absence, sustaining them by
Speaker 1: force of communal attention. The references don't produce knowledge, per se,
Speaker 1: they produce possibility. Lela's lips turned up at the corner's eyes,
Speaker 1: shining a locally realized web of danda reality on loan extended,
Speaker 1: so long as the community will defer closure, the library
Speaker 1: as a living incubator for intellectual superpositions. Theo never one
Speaker 1: to leave, the part of Haying added, it means it
Speaker 1: all could go silent to morrow if no one bothered
Speaker 1: to pursue a single and moriten footner. The possibility web
Speaker 1: collapses if curiosity dies. This, finally was the axis around
Speaker 1: which all the prior mysteries rotated, the critical mass of attention,
Speaker 1: its ongoing negotiation for annotation debate, and the living tradition
Speaker 1: of not just reading but interrogating absence. The library was
Speaker 1: less a building than a standing wave of speculation, a
Speaker 1: lattice of half glimpse logic, mapped, maintained, and sometimes if
Speaker 1: only briefly, made palpable. We let the idea settle among
Speaker 1: our notes, no longer urgent, just profound. In the following days,
Speaker 1: my volunteering took on a lighter grace. I watched the
Speaker 1: gentle ballet of library life, the students scuffing over reserved tables,
Speaker 1: assessed Bellamy's habitual straightening of then categorized shelf, the echoing
Speaker 1: footfuls acosso complants with a new kind of wonder. The
Speaker 1: place hadn't changed, but my frame for its contradictions had.
Speaker 1: I now saw the rare books waring as more than
Speaker 1: a mascleum for outdated scholarship. It was a quietly humming
Speaker 1: machine for the cultivation of the possible, a place where
Speaker 1: no answer was ever final, and no absence remained merely
Speaker 1: empty so long as someone somewhere cared enough to question it.
Speaker 1: I continued helping with donations, shelving, and the inevitable requests
Speaker 1: for books with the most ridiculous footnotes. Some days this
Speaker 1: meant reunited a classic's major with a treatise on mystery
Speaker 1: cult ritual containing thirty pages of cryptic cross reference. Other
Speaker 1: days it was just rendering visible quietly the human chain
Speaker 1: that animated the library's peculiar genius. Everywhere I looked, a
Speaker 1: culture of annotation felt nearly alive. At the study carols,
Speaker 1: a pair of students bickered over a footnoted error in
Speaker 1: a translated text, earnest the scrupling rebuffles in faint pencil.
Speaker 1: Down the hall, Leo led a small group for a
Speaker 1: shelf of problem titles, laughing gently each time a student
Speaker 1: found themselves hot by an unresolved contradiction. Even Miss as Bellamy,
Speaker 1: when she caught me pausing over Harrow's volume once more,
Speaker 1: only said, found your way back to the unfinished? This time,
Speaker 1: I answered, perhaps had found its way to me. That
Speaker 1: seems to be the library specialty from and then on.
Speaker 1: My work here was touched with the quiet contentment. I
Speaker 1: no longer felt the urge to force every puzzle to conclusion. Instead,
Speaker 1: I cherished the process, the provisional, the ambiguous, the gently inexplicable.
Speaker 1: The act of tending to these overlooked footnotes and their
Speaker 1: possible consequences was reward enough. A few afternoons later, assisting
Speaker 1: a new undergraduate with her research, I watched her brow
Speaker 1: crease as she paged through battered volume filled with Esu's
Speaker 1: footnotes for with real and fantastically referential She tapped a
Speaker 1: pencil against the margin, frowning. Why would anyone write so
Speaker 1: many notes about things that aren't even there? She asked
Speaker 1: the question, genuine, not skeptical. I smiled, an old engineer's smile,
Speaker 1: now mellowed by a kind of hard, darned humility. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's less about what's missing and more about the possibilities
Speaker 1: those gaps keep open. She hesitated, then nodded, returning to
Speaker 1: her book. Somewhere behind us, the old clock chimed its
Speaker 1: batter gives, ticking onward that evening, as I rolled the
Speaker 1: shoving cat along one last time, as their modern books
Speaker 1: thlid from the pile and landed open by my hip.
Speaker 1: Half upsent mindedly, I've bent to pick it up, pausing
Speaker 1: a fraction to long. At the bottom of the page,
Speaker 1: there alone floated a footnote mark simply see elsewhere, see elsewhere,
Speaker 1: not see also, or see above, or see diagram elsewhere.
Speaker 1: As if the world of reference had no boundaries. I
Speaker 1: glanced around the stacks of a renewed sense of gentle
Speaker 1: awe award that behind every book, every annotation, every carefully
Speaker 1: tended absence, possibility still gathered thick as the dust beneath
Speaker 1: the shelves. Perhaps all libraries above and below their cataloged
Speaker 1: surfaces were composites of knowledge in its after images, tending
Speaker 1: always and forever toward worlds and explanations not quite realized.
Speaker 1: Corridors and citations. When followed didn't resolve to closure. They
Speaker 1: forked and forked again, each new absence, holding open the
Speaker 1: promise of something just on the edge of becoming. I
Speaker 1: wheeled the cart to its resting place, like gathering outside
Speaker 1: the leaded glass, and as the door softly closed behind me,
Speaker 1: I thought, perhaps our understanding of reality is always bounded
Speaker 1: not by what we know, but by the footnotes we
Speaker 1: have not yet begun to follow, and that is the end.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
Speaker 1: the next one.