Speaker 1: Retirement hasn't diminished my appetite for stories. If anything, Stepping
Speaker 1: down from three decades of wrangling seniors through Shakespeare and
Speaker 1: their own uncertain poetry has given me a new fever
Speaker 1: for the ones I neglected, the silent, the strange, the overlooked.
Speaker 1: Immediate days are slow, the city's morning shy and watery,
Speaker 1: seabirds streaking the mist as I follow old stone lanes
Speaker 1: toward the public Library. Here, at least, no one expects
Speaker 1: me to explain symbolism in thirteen lines. The library is
Speaker 1: a patchwork limestone arches here, mid century glass there, original
Speaker 1: wood floors sloping gently after generations of traffic. Sunlight bounces
Speaker 1: through colored panes, pools on tables, runs up shelves like
Speaker 1: accidental gold. I used to think I knew its geography.
Speaker 1: After all these years, it remains a place of secretive restlessness.
Speaker 1: Doors that lead to stairways that lead to galleries that
Speaker 1: lead to doors. Each Wednesday I meet Clara for coffee
Speaker 1: by our favorite alcove, and every week since June I've
Speaker 1: set myself little rediscoveries, hunting for unread plaques, odd catalog entries,
Speaker 1: paintings i'm convinced have moved since February. That's how I
Speaker 1: found it. A corridor glancing off the geometry of sense
Speaker 1: I've been trailing. A breeze, really a trickle of cold
Speaker 1: below the west window, its glass painted with shipwrecks and
Speaker 1: saints near the stained glass, out of place on this
Speaker 1: mostly pragmatic floor, too playful for accounting or law. I
Speaker 1: noticed a streak of dustless tile leading away from the
Speaker 1: main stacks, around a partition that never seemed to have
Speaker 1: served any functional purpose. Inside barely lit shelves, breathing out
Speaker 1: the scent of old wood and paper salted by time.
Speaker 1: Far end, just beneath the slurry of colored light, a
Speaker 1: standalone shelf, stark, precise and entirely unremarkable, except that a
Speaker 1: scrap of card in script older than any signage elsewhere,
Speaker 1: read unwritten works, lettering in looping black ink, faded at
Speaker 1: its edges, as if drawn by a hand hesitant to
Speaker 1: claim permanence. On the shelf. Twenty maybe thirty volumes, hard back,
Speaker 1: uniform cream cloth, no dust jackets, beautifully blank spines, no titles,
Speaker 1: no author's name, just the reassurance of order. It'd be
Speaker 1: dishonest to say I was a wash in wonder. My
Speaker 1: first feeling was sharp skepticism, tempered by the memory of
Speaker 1: an installation by the designed students, one shelf overfilled with
Speaker 1: fake books for a class project on the illusion of text.
Speaker 1: Years ago. We hid love notes in the library for
Speaker 1: Valentine s and for months students insisted you could find
Speaker 1: confessions or sonnets if you just pulled the right volume.
Speaker 1: I grinned, half expecting a note inside to say, gotcha,
Speaker 1: you curious, old crow. But curiosity pressed me on. I
Speaker 1: chose a book near the center, heavy, pleasant in the hand,
Speaker 1: those subtle ripples at the edge of hand made paper,
Speaker 1: luxuriously impractical for library circulation. I opened it blank front leaf,
Speaker 1: next and next creamy toothsome sheets perfect for pen or brush,
Speaker 1: Utterly untouched. I checked the next and the third, almost
Speaker 1: laughing at the thoroughness of the joke, And then in
Speaker 1: the margins, half way through a passage. It wasn't printed,
Speaker 1: it wasn't even particularly neat. A few lines in handwriting,
Speaker 1: so familiar it startled something in my chest. I read
Speaker 1: it again, in looping blue black ink, laboriously neat. An
Speaker 1: excerpt from a letter I wrote to Lucy in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight, an unsent letter, never mailed, never shown, slotted
Speaker 1: in a box in the attic, unless moth and humidity
Speaker 1: have long since consumed it. How odd I feel? Loving
Speaker 1: you through layers? It began. I remembered the lines, the
Speaker 1: moment of writing them. Not quite a poem, not quite love,
Speaker 1: more a sketch of my own self doubt. Turning the pages,
Speaker 1: I found fragments, the start of a lesson plan, on
Speaker 1: the roll of memory in narrative form, the first lines
Speaker 1: from a poem I gave up in my twenties, even
Speaker 1: a sentence I scrawled in the margins of a student's
Speaker 1: final essay, in each my hand, my phrasing, no xeroxed,
Speaker 1: echo of published prose. Chairs creaked in the main reading room,
Speaker 1: the sound so ordinary it was easy to pretend nothing
Speaker 1: peculiar was happening at all. I closed the book, pulse
Speaker 1: ticking in my ears, with equal parts embarrassment and wonder.
Speaker 1: The corridor outside welcomed me back. For a few minutes.
Speaker 1: I simply held the blank book, brushing my thumb over
Speaker 1: the smooth cloth, not sure if I'd stumbled into a
Speaker 1: puzzle or a memory, if I was being played, or
Speaker 1: if something stranger threaded itself into these walls. That was
Speaker 1: the start of the unwritten section. For me, one of
Speaker 1: retirement's subtler freedoms is time spent adrift walking these days.
Speaker 1: My mornings begin by following impulses, sometimes down the hill
Speaker 1: to the bakery, sometimes through the market arcade, where vendors
Speaker 1: hawk fish and wild flower bundles. My afternoons drift ever
Speaker 1: back toward the library, its shifting architecture, promising comfort and
Speaker 1: surprise in equal measure. The city is good at layering itself.
Speaker 1: Most people don't question the mishmash old town houses with
Speaker 1: iron balconies above sleek new art venues, a Greek revival
Speaker 1: arts shielding a doorway now leading to a Vietnamese bakery.
Speaker 1: I delight in the irregularities, tiles stamped with different years,
Speaker 1: place names changing with the tides of population, scars of
Speaker 1: old fires patched with brickwork from a dozen ears. The
Speaker 1: library is a living artifact of this, sections dovetailed on
Speaker 1: to one another by generations of expansion. The children's wing
Speaker 1: a butts are walled garden itself annexed from a convent
Speaker 1: up one flight. Stacks run off at odd angles to corridors,
Speaker 1: once designed for higher brigades and now packed with atlases.
Speaker 1: Nobody consults no one, not even the most venerable librarians,
Speaker 1: claim to have mapped all its nooks. Clara is the
Speaker 1: only person I can count on for an uncynical reaction
Speaker 1: to these games. She was the city archives heartbeat for
Speaker 1: forty years, a woman who believes every map is incomplete,
Speaker 1: every record a gentle lie. Our friendship is stitched with
Speaker 1: shared skepticism. We've both seen how nostalgia dresses up the past,
Speaker 1: makes legends out of happy accidents. We meet Wednesdays for
Speaker 1: coffee and almond quass us, making bets about which house
Speaker 1: on Crown Street will collapse first, or which local politician
Speaker 1: has actually read the poetry they quote on banners. She
Speaker 1: lives on the next block, but moves at library pace
Speaker 1: scrupulously slow, always on the lookout for a story. Herself. Javvy,
Speaker 1: by contrast, is the bright spark at the circulation desk,
Speaker 1: still convinced that Dewey decimals point to a higher truth.
Speaker 1: He's young, half my age may be less, but sees
Speaker 1: the library as a kind of living system. Where I
Speaker 1: am suspicious, he is trusting at my weekly checkouts. He
Speaker 1: always jokes that the older the book, the closer I
Speaker 1: must feel to time travel. Sometimes he'll carry his lunch
Speaker 1: into the back room, where records of the library's centuries
Speaker 1: are kept in battered ledgers. Javy's been cataloging forgotten shelf
Speaker 1: codes all summer, teasing me whenever I claim to have
Speaker 1: outfoxed him with an uncataloged title. Then there's Miriam, a
Speaker 1: head librarian silver curls, very little patience for idle chatter,
Speaker 1: but a mind that moves with feline precision through rumors
Speaker 1: and rules Alike, Miriam conducts library tour with the drama
Speaker 1: of a stage manager, occasionally dropping cryptic asides about secret
Speaker 1: doors or hidden traditions in the oldest rooms. She claims
Speaker 1: to have once read every spine until there were no
Speaker 1: new titles left, though Clara insists Miriam enjoys making up
Speaker 1: precisely that sort of men. I've kept journals since I
Speaker 1: was fifteen. Boxes upon boxes. It's a kind of pride
Speaker 1: that private archive, a monument to my own adolescence, teaching years,
Speaker 1: small disasters, and bright happiness. Some entries read like shopping lists,
Speaker 1: some hum with ambition for every page I ever shared, published,
Speaker 1: read aloud, pressed into a student's back pack. There are
Speaker 1: dozens I never showed any one in the class room.
Speaker 1: I always told my students every story matters, written or not.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I wonder what the city would look like if
Speaker 1: we collected every shadow tale. The city seems to agree.
Speaker 1: Our literary festivals filled streets with poets and musicians, oral
Speaker 1: story tellers, and small children improvising entire novels over grape juice.
Speaker 1: Most residents can recite at least one street legend or
Speaker 1: family fable. Quite a few claim to have contributed to
Speaker 1: the city's unofficial history just by passing through the right
Speaker 1: square at midnight. The library bears all of this. Its
Speaker 1: faded directories lead to offices that no longer exist. Its
Speaker 1: old signs point to archives swallowed by new acquisitions. There's
Speaker 1: a dignity to that endlessness. Nooks rich in dust, the
Speaker 1: faint smell of ancient ink, whispers of lives that built, rebuilt,
Speaker 1: or just wandered in for an afternoon and never quite left.
Speaker 1: These are the ingredients that shaped my first encounter with
Speaker 1: the unwritten section. A world full of incomplete stories, layered
Speaker 1: spaces and people convinced in some useful way that mysteries
Speaker 1: are simply puzzles waiting to be loved. If you believe,
Speaker 1: as I had, that personal history is a story, you own.
Speaker 1: Discoveries like this sting as much as they intrigue. Day
Speaker 1: after the first encounter, in that liminal hour after lunch,
Speaker 1: I returned. The city was giddy with sun, and the
Speaker 1: library bustled. Students trapes the marble stairs. Regulars camped beneath
Speaker 1: the fanl with newspapers. I waited until the crowd thinned,
Speaker 1: and collected the volume I had handled yesterday, Reasoning that
Speaker 1: I might have misremembered its position. Instead of standing in
Speaker 1: the aisle, I carried it to the nearest reading alcove,
Speaker 1: set it by the lamp, opened its sturdy covers. The
Speaker 1: first few leaves were blank as before, but a third
Speaker 1: of the way in an essay appeared clear, sharp lines,
Speaker 1: topped with the date two thousand three. It was unmistakably
Speaker 1: my style, personal ruminative, referencing the time I had accidentally
Speaker 1: nominated three students with the same surname for an academic award,
Speaker 1: a fiasco I had long buried in memory and certainly
Speaker 1: never written up as I read, I even recognized small
Speaker 1: self critiques, abbreviations I adopted only during that stretch of
Speaker 1: my teaching years. Only Now midway through the passage, smack
Speaker 1: in the middle of a page, I slipped there, alongside
Speaker 1: a familiar paragraph, sat a new set of lines in
Speaker 1: tidy but unfamiliar block capitals. Javvy, please forward the request
Speaker 1: for archival list see attached record for programming notes. Could
Speaker 1: be what you're looking for. M. There was no reason
Speaker 1: for this, jav and I had never spoken about archival lists.
Speaker 1: M matched Miriam's initial but the context did not compute
Speaker 1: the rest of the essay. Meandered on as if the
Speaker 1: interruption was as natural as rainfall inside a ball room.
Speaker 1: Bemused more than alarmed. I checked the inside cover, no title,
Speaker 1: but a circulation card, calligraphed and brittle, stamped with dates
Speaker 1: in careful rows. The barcode box, the little blank where
Speaker 1: we scanned books at checkout, held nothing at all. Only
Speaker 1: the columns for in and out were filled many times,
Speaker 1: but all with the same faded initials that never quite
Speaker 1: spelled out a name. I closed the book gently, feeling
Speaker 1: a flicker of trespass curiosity. A practical urge to draw
Speaker 1: others in for a second opinion. One at Clara was
Speaker 1: in her usual haunt, idly tracing her way through genealogy records.
Speaker 1: I carried the book over, waited until she looked up
Speaker 1: from her magnifier, and handed it to her with theatrical solemnity.
Speaker 1: Look at this puzzle of the week, I said. She
Speaker 1: paged through, shrugged, and gave me that glance she reserves
Speaker 1: for moments when she suspects I'm in one of my moods.
Speaker 1: Lovely paper, someone's art project or your nostalgia runner mock
Speaker 1: read the essay do you recognize? But by then she
Speaker 1: had skimmed to the end and declared its creative journaling
Speaker 1: there's always debris left from someone's half finished memoir. Did
Speaker 1: you sneak it in here when you were fourteen? Not
Speaker 1: my handwriting, I lied through my teeth. Clara smirked. If
Speaker 1: it's your secret autobiography, I won't tell any one. But
Speaker 1: my archives have stranger ghost stories than this. A few
Speaker 1: hours later, I tried my luck with Miriam, whose talent
Speaker 1: for smiling her way out of an interrogation is only
Speaker 1: exceeded by her ability to look entirely too interested in
Speaker 1: your secrets. She barely looked at the book before returning
Speaker 1: it to my hands with a smile. That old section.
Speaker 1: We always find the oddest things there. It encourages the imagination,
Speaker 1: don't you think. Don't spoil the fun. But I started,
Speaker 1: and she winked. The conversation ended on her terms. Had
Speaker 1: I kept better composure, perhaps I could have passed off
Speaker 1: my confusion as absent mindedness. Yet deep in my rib cage,
Speaker 1: a strange certainty grew. This was not a careless deposit
Speaker 1: from decades ago, not the handiwork of a creative prankster,
Speaker 1: who would have copied passages from my private note books.
Speaker 1: One's never brought outside my house, let alone. The library
Speaker 1: filled out with sentences freshly relevant to my life this week,
Speaker 1: crossed with messages plainly never meant for my eyes, every
Speaker 1: habit I've acquired in years of teaching, all the methodical
Speaker 1: skepticism kicked in. Then. If the shelf was a joke,
Speaker 1: it was elaborate beyond reason. If it was a pattern,
Speaker 1: the rules were slipperiest curiosity had ever let me chase.
Speaker 1: So I set about testing with the same thoroughness I
Speaker 1: once reserved for lesson plans and contentious committee meetings. I
Speaker 1: visited the unwritten shelf in late afternoons, when the library
Speaker 1: was quietest. I pulled twelve books, careful not to stack
Speaker 1: them identically, and inspected every page in succession. I kept notes,
Speaker 1: cross reference passages, and snapped discreet photos with my phone.
Speaker 1: Sometimes a book was blank from end to end. Other
Speaker 1: times a page or two contained lines of handwriting close
Speaker 1: enough to mine that I'd swear i'd written them, but
Speaker 1: with altered spellings or dates that made no sense. In
Speaker 1: some volumes, there were whole paragraphs from a poem I'd
Speaker 1: lost in a move. In others, beginnings of essays I
Speaker 1: had composed only in my head. Once I found a
Speaker 1: recipe in hasty looping script for an almond cake I
Speaker 1: devised for Lucy's unspeakably dreadful birthday in nineteen ninety nine. Elsewhere,
Speaker 1: small scrawls in the margins, snippets from student essays, echoing
Speaker 1: names from different years, as though shreds of class room
Speaker 1: memory had sown themselves into the binding. What disturbed me,
Speaker 1: if you could call it that, was not that the
Speaker 1: passages were familiar, but that their appearance shifted a line
Speaker 1: that appeared one afternoon, would vanish by the next morning.
Speaker 1: New passages arrived without pattern, sometimes more finished, sometimes altered,
Speaker 1: with edits that nudged at earlier drafts but corrected what
Speaker 1: I never had. Testing my memory, I dug out all
Speaker 1: journals from the attic, a taxonomist on the hunt for
Speaker 1: a mislaid specimen. Some matches were valbatim, a turn of phrase,
Speaker 1: a distinctive metaphor. Others were ghosts, related in tone and details,
Speaker 1: but with postscripted references to things that in the original
Speaker 1: writing hadn't yet occurred. The physical books revealed no clues,
Speaker 1: no water mark but the standard, no pencil impressions, no
Speaker 1: sign of erasure or underdrawing, no sign of copying, forgery,
Speaker 1: or nefarious library wizardry, just page after page of possibility.
Speaker 1: In idle conversation, I tried to bait the truth from Javy,
Speaker 1: whose own project cataloging the library's history sometimes produced the
Speaker 1: kinds of bibliographic quirks i'd come to expect. He'd heard
Speaker 1: rumors of the blank book prank, but his own experiences
Speaker 1: were ordinary. No messages, no dejavous, he shrugged, just blank pages.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're hoping to see your own handwriting. Clara, on
Speaker 1: another walk, dismissed the phenomenon again with a laugh. That
Speaker 1: unwritten shelf always reminds you of yourself, doesn't it. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's a mnemonic trick. But when I pressed, she demurred
Speaker 1: she had never pulled any anything more interesting than the
Speaker 1: odds sketch or half finished crossword from its depths. The
Speaker 1: puzzle deepened in the library's own public systems. The unwritten
Speaker 1: works were not cataloged. Their call numbers appeared in no database,
Speaker 1: and the shelf, though physically present, mapped to no digital record.
Speaker 1: No barcode in the system matched the book's spines, no
Speaker 1: metadator explained their presence. When I checked the shelving itself,
Speaker 1: I found details that contradicted the rest of the room.
Speaker 1: The wood was older, worn smooth, where nearby shelves were rough,
Speaker 1: noticeably dust free, as though handled, often a strange island
Speaker 1: of clarity in a neglected corner. Unable to let the
Speaker 1: matter rest, I leafed through city and library histories at home.
Speaker 1: The earliest renovation records showed nothing. Maps from the late
Speaker 1: nineteenth century made no mention of the corridor or the shelf,
Speaker 1: but in a faded photograph clipped from a nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: three news supplement. I spotted and now dim label unwritten
Speaker 1: works marked beside what looked uncannily like the very shelf
Speaker 1: in question. My questions multiplied. Were these books reporting back
Speaker 1: the facts of my living? Were they sewn together from
Speaker 1: unspoken memory, from drafts that I'd finally abandoned, or more troubling,
Speaker 1: from things I'd never realized I'd written. Were other lives,
Speaker 1: perhaps even other readers, wrapped up in this odd machinery.
Speaker 1: I was forced to consider the possibility that some entries
Speaker 1: were not drawn from the past at all, but from
Speaker 1: what might have been, or as a tiny, uncanny dread suggested,
Speaker 1: what would one day be written. Some pages described lessons
Speaker 1: never taught, phone calls, I never made small domestic tragedies
Speaker 1: so plausible I could almost remember the grief, yet could
Speaker 1: not date or prove them. Testing these limits became for
Speaker 1: a time my preoccupation. Stepping back from my compulsive examination,
Speaker 1: something shifted. I caught myself expecting the next clue to
Speaker 1: fit a tidy pattern. I'd been scanning, probing, trying to
Speaker 1: catch the shelf in the act, as though the right
Speaker 1: combination of light and attention. The right question would reveal
Speaker 1: the trick, expose a misplaced note book, a curate's joke,
Speaker 1: the old alchemy of city bureaucracy gone awry. Instead, the
Speaker 1: evidence thickened and contradicted itself. The real change crept in quietly.
Speaker 1: Months after my first visit, I found myself reading and
Speaker 1: rereading the faded photograph from nineteen fifty three, seeing the
Speaker 1: shelf unchanged while the rest of the room had aged
Speaker 1: shifted trembled with the vibrations of a city remaking itself.
Speaker 1: The shelf seemed never quite to belong in one era
Speaker 1: or another. The shifting content grew stranger. Sometimes the entries
Speaker 1: responded almost instantly to present circumstances. One morning, returning from
Speaker 1: a walk in the park, I opened a volume and
Speaker 1: found a passage referencing the bench under the camellia, where,
Speaker 1: only days before Lucy had lost an earring. She hadn't
Speaker 1: written about it, I hadn't mentioned it to any one
Speaker 1: save her, and she'd only noted in passing that she
Speaker 1: never saw where it fell. Another day, a book described
Speaker 1: an expression Lucy made during an argument, something I'd never recorded,
Speaker 1: but which rang so true that I had to stop
Speaker 1: close my eyes and wonder if the memory belonged to
Speaker 1: me at all. It occurred to me, not for the
Speaker 1: first time, that the books were not reflecting a static
Speaker 1: sum of my written past, or even my remembered life.
Speaker 1: The unwritten section was responsive. It was not a ledger
Speaker 1: or a message from the past, but a living mirror,
Speaker 1: picking up the echoes of present experience, wild with possible futures,
Speaker 1: and reshaping itself Accordingly, echoes of a quotation I'd assigned
Speaker 1: to classes for years came to mind. Books are the
Speaker 1: mirrors of the soul I'd used it to prod students
Speaker 1: out of their comfort zones suggest that every interpretation was
Speaker 1: a product of its reader as much as its text.
Speaker 1: Here the saying felt literal. I set myself to test again,
Speaker 1: rational scientific, this time with others eyes. Next coffee with Clara,
Speaker 1: I gently prodded her to try an experiment. Pick any book,
Speaker 1: any at all, I coaxed. Turn to the middle, tell
Speaker 1: me what you see, she humored me, walking up and
Speaker 1: down the shelf before pulling a slim, unassuming volume with
Speaker 1: a bemused glance. She cracked it open, flipped a few pages,
Speaker 1: and frowned. Just lines she said nonsense, grafts, bits of gibberish.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's an old code or an anagram. Peering over
Speaker 1: her shoulder, I saw what looked like half translated language,
Speaker 1: not English, not quite anything in place of familiar memories.
Speaker 1: It was as though the page was waiting for someone
Speaker 1: to make meaning. It was not a prank. It was
Speaker 1: not a trick played just on me, or or rather,
Speaker 1: it seemed to play with the rules of perception itself.
Speaker 1: A creeping wonder overtook any earlier annoyance. I began to
Speaker 1: form the framework for a new belief, one that required
Speaker 1: setting aside for once my love of tidy explanations. The
Speaker 1: unwritten section was less an archive of secrets and more
Speaker 1: an engine of interpretation, a conduit between reader memory, imagination,
Speaker 1: and perhaps something much older and larger than any individual.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what that meant, not really yet the
Speaker 1: seed of a fresh, unsettling curiosity began to root itself
Speaker 1: at the bottom of my day. Habit is a strange servant.
Speaker 1: I paid the unwritten shelf a half attentive visit for weeks,
Speaker 1: often simply passing by, watching for signs that others saw
Speaker 1: what I did. It was on a rainy Tuesday, a
Speaker 1: lull in the city's festival calendar. The streets outside half
Speaker 1: deserted that I first noticed another reader drawn to the
Speaker 1: margin of the corridor. She wore a red coat, frayed
Speaker 1: at the cuffs, umbrella tucked beneath her arm. She lingered
Speaker 1: by the shelf, fingers hovering as if reading spines that
Speaker 1: held no titles. I hovered near by, awkward, suddenly to
Speaker 1: realize I was the kind of person who now stalked
Speaker 1: strangers for their relationship with blank books. At length, I
Speaker 1: introduced myself in the most harmless way I could muster apologies,
Speaker 1: I said, I couldn't help, But notice you were looking
Speaker 1: at these Did you find anything interesting? She hesitated, colored slightly,
Speaker 1: and gave a noncommittal smile. Sometimes I think the books
Speaker 1: know what I'm going through, she offered. Once I opened
Speaker 1: one and found an argument with my sister word for word,
Speaker 1: But no one believed me when I told them, that's extraordinary,
Speaker 1: I said, and was gratified by her relieved expression. A
Speaker 1: fellow traveler unmasked, what do you think it means? She shrugged,
Speaker 1: more sure of her self. Now, maybe the books are
Speaker 1: a space for stories. We're still living, or ones we
Speaker 1: never wrote down. Who knows. Sometimes I think it's just
Speaker 1: me projecting, But it feels too specific for that, I prompted.
Speaker 1: She nodded, exactly. I haven't told anyone about the books
Speaker 1: for years. It's easier to let them be. This candid
Speaker 1: moment spurred me to probe, and for the first time
Speaker 1: I decided to ask Miriam with real intensity, there's something odd.
Speaker 1: I told her about the unwritten section. It's not just
Speaker 1: nostalgia or creative writing, is it. Miriam grew quiet, her
Speaker 1: usual breezy confidence replaced by a contained seriousness. There have
Speaker 1: been rumors since I started here. Some call it a
Speaker 1: fluke of architecture, some a literary tradition, something begun by
Speaker 1: the city's founder, perhaps who was eccentric. She laughed gently
Speaker 1: at the understatement. He believed, according to old minutes and
Speaker 1: personal notes, not everything that fills a book needs to
Speaker 1: be written before it's read. If there's a secret, it
Speaker 1: runs deep, deeper than policies. Certainly permission by a mission,
Speaker 1: if not assent granted. I began exploring the library archives
Speaker 1: in Earnest. In the archives, battered Borough logs revealed dates
Speaker 1: that predated the city's recorded founding. Some names repeated from
Speaker 1: shelf to shelf. Ones I recognized old street names, family
Speaker 1: surnames etched on the city's architecture, even some that appeared
Speaker 1: in old lists of the city planners. The circulation was
Speaker 1: recursive logs referencing books unreadable by today's catalog but noted
Speaker 1: as in frequent use, margins filled with notes initials that
Speaker 1: never spelled out names, but appeared again and again across
Speaker 1: the decades. Here the past folded in on itself. A
Speaker 1: book might appear with a phrase written by someone alive today,
Speaker 1: echoing a wish or memory not yet published. Another would
Speaker 1: have log entries in the bold, swirling script of architects
Speaker 1: who built the city, squares, names that now survived only
Speaker 1: as cross streets and building dedications. A pattern began to emerge,
Speaker 1: growing clearer in repetition. The unwritten section sat outside ordinary
Speaker 1: library logic, a palimpsest overwriteable but never erased. A living
Speaker 1: record of personal, communal and anticipated stories wound around the
Speaker 1: heartbeat of the city. Perspective bends in the face of strangeness.
Speaker 1: The more I uncovered, the more I feared that to
Speaker 1: investigate alone was to misunderstand to narrow the phenomenon with
Speaker 1: the cauterizing tools of personal autobiography. On a day heavy
Speaker 1: with marine fogg, I realized, truly realized. I was hoping,
Speaker 1: hoping for the next book to contain the page I'd lost,
Speaker 1: hoping for the letter I once meant to send, hoping
Speaker 1: for something tender, unfinished, a wish that had not quite
Speaker 1: found paper. Instead, it gave me not my story, but Clara's,
Speaker 1: a doggyed page filled with a paragraph about a childhood
Speaker 1: visit to a southern city, a lost hat, and the
Speaker 1: taste of cocoanut candy. I had heard her allude to
Speaker 1: this once, years earlier in passing, never written down, almost forgotten,
Speaker 1: now rendered in ink that matched her style more than mine.
Speaker 1: When I showed her, she pressed the paper flat, held
Speaker 1: it to her chest, and said, almost reverently, I must
Speaker 1: have told this story to someone, or maybe I dreamed
Speaker 1: I did. The realization landed with quiet magnitude. The shelf
Speaker 1: was never just mine. It belonged to the city, to
Speaker 1: all those who had passed through its doors, patching together
Speaker 1: shared and solitary secrets, weaving the everyday epoch of communal life.
Speaker 1: I began mapping the connections names, stories, memories only tangentially
Speaker 1: associated with me, but which resonated through other lives in small,
Speaker 1: telling ways. The shelf wasn't merely a trick of persons
Speaker 1: recall or a depository of old notes. It was a
Speaker 1: living thread, a tradition less documented than enacted, sustained in
Speaker 1: the very act of reading, remembering, and sometimes hoping. I
Speaker 1: had to understand the mystery had opened wider, no longer
Speaker 1: a mirror simply for my own recollection, but a window
Speaker 1: on to a broader, softly interwoven world. I set out
Speaker 1: to consult archives with fresh eyes, to track down former staff,
Speaker 1: to ask patrons quietly whether they had ever found their
Speaker 1: own words, or those that felt as if they belonged
Speaker 1: to them, waiting unwritten for someone to claim them. If
Speaker 1: the story was not only mine, then perhaps the unwritten
Speaker 1: section was the city's greatest living collaboration, a book that
Speaker 1: no one had finished writing and that none could ever
Speaker 1: fully read. The first person I approached carefully was Missus Ballantine,
Speaker 1: that is, Lucil Ballantine, retired postmistress whose recall for city
Speaker 1: faces rivals the filing systems she once ran. I found
Speaker 1: her sorting through greeting cards in the lobby as I entered,
Speaker 1: pausing at each one as if measuring possible futures. Her
Speaker 1: reading glasses sat on the tip of her nose. She
Speaker 1: greeted me with the same dry I see you're still
Speaker 1: haunting these stacks she's used since I taught her granddaughter.
Speaker 1: I broached the subject delicately. Did you ever spend time
Speaker 1: near the back old shelf marked unwritten works, the one
Speaker 1: in the west corridor under the stained glass. Her eyes
Speaker 1: went sharp, the greeting cards sorting abandoned. Ah. That shelf
Speaker 1: used to trip me as a girl. Always thought it
Speaker 1: was for discards, oddments, a clearing house for things not
Speaker 1: meant for public view. No titles, no stamps. I'd open
Speaker 1: one as a lark sometimes, but never found anything but
Speaker 1: dusty pages. Well, she hesitated. Once I came across a
Speaker 1: shopping list my mother used to hum about, never written,
Speaker 1: but the same order, the same items. I thought it
Speaker 1: a joke, a trick of mind. Never mentioned it, she
Speaker 1: leaned in, half, whispering, why do you ask? I tried
Speaker 1: to give less away than I felt. I'm gathering stories,
Speaker 1: mapping the secrets of our little corners. Turns out your
Speaker 1: not the first. This emboldened me. I spent the next
Speaker 1: days in a blur of polite queries and half whispered questions,
Speaker 1: approaching regulars in the genealogy room at the noon lecture series,
Speaker 1: even in the slow shuffling circle who meet over patchwork
Speaker 1: and city gossip on the second floor landing each Tuesday.
Speaker 1: Most recalled the shelf with a kind of dull placidity.
Speaker 1: Oh you mean the one with the plain books. Always
Speaker 1: looked empty to me, or a bit dreary. Now I
Speaker 1: found a page with doodles once, but nothing special. A
Speaker 1: few smiled at the memory of drawing smiley faces or
Speaker 1: leaving notes for the next reader, never anything grander than
Speaker 1: a joke. But there were exceptions. Mister Alvarez, an elderly poet,
Speaker 1: showed up for every new book's display and sat willingly
Speaker 1: for an intero on the condition that I kept his
Speaker 1: favorite seat near the radiator available. He fixed me with
Speaker 1: a mournful gaze, fingers perpetually stained from cheap fountain pen refles.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you something odd. Long ago, when my wife
Speaker 1: was alive, I would come to that shelf hoping to
Speaker 1: find something left for me. Once in winter. I pulled
Speaker 1: a book off the end, and there just one page,
Speaker 1: one verse, a fragment I had composed in my head
Speaker 1: but never written down a poem for her. He spread
Speaker 1: his hands as if helpless, even decades later to explain,
Speaker 1: maybe it's a dream filling the gap. Maybe that's what
Speaker 1: memory is. But it chilled me. Others, when pressed, described
Speaker 1: similar brushes, not with direct recollection, but with sensations, ripples
Speaker 1: of possibility. A teacher in her thirties remembered finding a
Speaker 1: recipe that matched her grandmother's voice, though she'd never seen
Speaker 1: it in print. A shy teen, poked along by his
Speaker 1: little sister, confessed, there was once a kind of comic
Speaker 1: with my friend's nicknames characters. I never showed that to
Speaker 1: any one, but it was in one of those books.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's just what I wanted to see. I cataloged
Speaker 1: these accounts obsessively, hours at my dining table, drawing lines
Speaker 1: and arrows among note cards. Some treated the shelf with
Speaker 1: obvious reverence, a place for secret comfort. Others avoided it
Speaker 1: even now, for fear, fear of finding something forgotten, something
Speaker 1: better left unwritten. The spectrum of response fascinated me as
Speaker 1: deeply as the phenomenon itself. Over time, patterns glimmered through threads,
Speaker 1: connecting memories, relationships, great local misfortunes, and city joys. A
Speaker 1: young artist confessed that years earlier, she copied a few
Speaker 1: lines of what she thought was nonsense from an unwritten
Speaker 1: volume for an upcoming installation. When she blithely shared a
Speaker 1: photo of her sketch book, her best friend Bianca, recognized
Speaker 1: her own handwriting, and, more shockingly, a private wish neither
Speaker 1: had ever discussed. It was uncanny, the artist said. After
Speaker 1: we both avoided the shelf, but sometimes when I walked past,
Speaker 1: I felt it pulling, like maybe our stories get stored
Speaker 1: there before we ever share them. Javvy, after months of
Speaker 1: half joking avoidance, at last admitted to his own fleeting encounter.
Speaker 1: We stood together by the shelf at closing one evening,
Speaker 1: our shadows cast brief and watery by the stained glass.
Speaker 1: I haven't told you when I first started here, I
Speaker 1: was in a panic about university applications, all the pressure.
Speaker 1: I pulled a book just for luck and read a letter.
Speaker 1: It was. It was an acceptance, but in my handwriting.
Speaker 1: I never even told any one about that dream. I
Speaker 1: put the book back. It felt I don't know, almost wrong,
Speaker 1: like cheating. He gave a self deprecating laugh. But I
Speaker 1: got in, did I Maybe the shelf knew something I didn't.
Speaker 1: Maybe I had to believe. The more stories I mapped,
Speaker 1: the more I noticed overlaps, same idioms. Family law telegraphed
Speaker 1: in odd detail, moments recorded by the unwritten books before
Speaker 1: they occurred, sometimes echoing in social or civic events. Names recurred,
Speaker 1: old family surnames woven through generations, written in flourishes that
Speaker 1: changed with each decade. As I dug further into accession records,
Speaker 1: check out logs, and hand annotated directory cards, curiosities compounded.
Speaker 1: There were names borrowers whose library cards did not exist yet,
Speaker 1: whose surnames were inscribed on corner stones and city plaques.
Speaker 1: I matched unusual dates in marginal notes to city events,
Speaker 1: a warehouse fire, a festival, the early days of the
Speaker 1: Great Spring Parade. In certain cases, check out dates predated
Speaker 1: the opening of the library, referencing traditions and events nobody
Speaker 1: present could remember. What most intrigued me were references to
Speaker 1: communal memory, a sense that the unwritten section, more than
Speaker 1: echoing private experience, was mapping shared narrative tissue, as if
Speaker 1: each reading, each unspoken wish or memory subtly revised the
Speaker 1: stories the city told about itself. Contradictions blossomed. I approached
Speaker 1: doctor Ramai, the city historian, at a municipal luncheon, hoping
Speaker 1: for institutional clarity. He was polite, if distracted, his coffee
Speaker 1: rippling as he gestured through architectural blueprints. There are legends
Speaker 1: he allowed of literary experiments, collaborative writing projects in the
Speaker 1: early twentieth century, civic groups leaving loose leaf books with
Speaker 1: the invitation to finish the story. Some perhaps saw it
Speaker 1: as a rite of passage, anonymous contributions, fingerprints left on
Speaker 1: the compost heap of city culture. I suspect it's nothing supernatural.
Speaker 1: Handwriting misleads, memory makes patterns of happenstance. But what about
Speaker 1: passages matching events that hadn't yet happened, or handwriting that
Speaker 1: seems intimate to specific readers? I pressed. He smiled, kind enough,
Speaker 1: but skeptical. You would be surprised how easily minds connect
Speaker 1: the dots. Library cataloging was chaotic for years, no formal
Speaker 1: audit the shelf might be a palimpsyst for collective, wishful thinking,
Speaker 1: self fulfilling in a way that narrative had force, yet
Speaker 1: never fully accounted for the lines written in unmistakably personal hands,
Speaker 1: for the uncannily prescient details. At a garden party hosted
Speaker 1: by the Bouden family, a surname i'd found frequently in
Speaker 1: check out logs, predating any living member, I was introduced
Speaker 1: to missus Pascale, White haired, resolute. She listened to my
Speaker 1: queries with a candor old age sometimes bestows. My grandfather
Speaker 1: said the shelf, let you see what you needed, not
Speaker 1: what you wanted. He believed his wedding vow was written
Speaker 1: in an unwritten book before he ever confessed it, and
Speaker 1: after my grandmother died, he'd visit, reading the blank pages
Speaker 1: with a kind of devotion. Did he see words? Did
Speaker 1: he imagine them? He wouldn't say. Said it was enough
Speaker 1: that both could be true. That line both could be
Speaker 1: true seemed to pulse through everything I discovered. Clara and Miriam,
Speaker 1: brought together over tea on a windswept afternoon, gamely debated
Speaker 1: the phenomenon, the former positing psychological projection, the latter marveling
Speaker 1: at social tradition or archival ambiguity. Javvy, always eager for
Speaker 1: a metaphor to make meaning, wrapped his thoughts in talk
Speaker 1: of memory ghosts, the idea that unresolved stories shaped the
Speaker 1: texture of interpretation more than ink ever could. I tried
Speaker 1: my best to navigate elegantly among the theories, but too
Speaker 1: much lines up. I argued, events referenced before they occur, handwriting,
Speaker 1: shifting to match a reader the specificity. None of it
Speaker 1: fits tidily in tradition or suggestion alone. Clara always the
Speaker 1: Devil's advocate, counted, and yet what else could it be
Speaker 1: but a collective game played on blank paper, an illusion powerful, yes,
Speaker 1: but perhaps that's the point. We read ourselves into stories,
Speaker 1: because our lives are schematic, not scripted. Stories shape themselves.
Speaker 1: In the retelling, Miriam only gave her secretive smile equal
Speaker 1: parts amused and chiding, why must you all settle for? Either? Or?
Speaker 1: Sometimes a tradition outlasts its origin. Sometimes a space becomes
Speaker 1: what it's used for, not what it was designed for.
Speaker 1: Leave a shelf for stories, and eventually stories find it.
Speaker 1: Around this time, I began to realize that the contradictions
Speaker 1: themselves were bracing fuel for curiosity, not a wall against it.
Speaker 1: A stronger thread of contradiction appeared as I started to
Speaker 1: note the unwritten section's relationship with time itself. I'd been
Speaker 1: documenting passages with a detail hitherto reserved only for my
Speaker 1: teaching days, date, page, handwriting, emotional tone. The more precise
Speaker 1: my observation, the more the resisted generalization. One afternoon, I
Speaker 1: took a book to the genealogy room, half hoping that
Speaker 1: a change in space might alter the result. There, among
Speaker 1: the hum of computers and the click of microfilm reels,
Speaker 1: I found a passage in neat cursive that began opening
Speaker 1: ceremony Sunday next speech at noon, begin with the line
Speaker 1: spring returns and so do we. I paused. Those words
Speaker 1: matched an event poster hanging in the lobby advertising the
Speaker 1: forthcoming city parade, the text not yet made public. I
Speaker 1: was unsettled. Had some one planted the words, or was
Speaker 1: I seeing what I wished to see? Days later, during
Speaker 1: the parade, Councilwoman Vile delivered those lines verbatim, in the
Speaker 1: same cadence and emphasis. I had never discussed the passage,
Speaker 1: and I asked Vile directly weeks afterward whether she received
Speaker 1: any library inspiration. She laughed, No, that line just came
Speaker 1: to me in the bath. I think the coincidence gnawed
Speaker 1: at me. The notion that the shelf could surface a
Speaker 1: fragment before it was expressed to the world seemed to
Speaker 1: shift the library's secret outward, from a record of memory
Speaker 1: into a field of possibility. Clara, at first unsettled, grew
Speaker 1: fascinated as I shared my notes. One book, open days
Speaker 1: before her plan trip abroad, described a train station, the
Speaker 1: feeling of bittersweet departure, phrases she'd written only in her mind.
Speaker 1: It's not prediction, she mused, It's more like potential, Like
Speaker 1: the book knows the directions I could take. The effect
Speaker 1: was not omnipresent. Sometimes a book was simply blank, sometimes
Speaker 1: nonsense or text that felt like a clumsy translation of intent,
Speaker 1: a signal dampened by distance or skepticism. But when it worked,
Speaker 1: it was vivid, specific and unrepeatable. My understanding now teeated.
Speaker 1: If the unwritten section was a chamber for memory alone,
Speaker 1: it should restrict itself to the echoes of what had
Speaker 1: already happened or been conceived. If it was mere projection,
Speaker 1: the specificity was almost too sharp. Instead, the shelves seemed
Speaker 1: to form, in slow shifting palimpsest, a record not only
Speaker 1: of what the city had been and was, but of
Speaker 1: what its citizens could yet become. A growing desire to test,
Speaker 1: to formalize, overtook my earlier hesitancy. I proposed to Miriam
Speaker 1: and Clara a discreet experiment, an attempt to see whether
Speaker 1: the effect might be seeded, observed, perhaps constrained. We chose
Speaker 1: a circle of regular library patrons, all trusted, all willing
Speaker 1: to endure a whiff of curiosity and suspicion on my
Speaker 1: saiser a method. Each wrote down privately, one secret, a wish,
Speaker 1: a regret, a memory. We folded these slips and locked
Speaker 1: them briefly in a box, then returned them to our pockets,
Speaker 1: with a pledge that no one would speak of them
Speaker 1: until the end. Then, one after another we visited the
Speaker 1: unwritten section, and each chose a book at random. Results
Speaker 1: were a patchwork for some blank pages, or in one case,
Speaker 1: a pattern of lines and leaves, which the reader insisted
Speaker 1: captured the feeling and only the feeling, of their regret.
Speaker 1: But for two of us the connection was immediate and undeniable.
Speaker 1: Missus Ballantine found a single sentence describing a moment she'd
Speaker 1: never spoken aloud, standing at a bus stop, heart in
Speaker 1: her shoes, watching rain pool in the gutter, and yearning
Speaker 1: for distant family. The language, she said was not my phrasing,
Speaker 1: but my thought. Javvy his slip describing an unnamed fear
Speaker 1: about his brother's health, found a passage referencing the call
Speaker 1: no one wants to receive, written again in his own hand,
Speaker 1: in the particular looping characters I recognized from our shared
Speaker 1: catalog records. They compared notes, hesitated, then swapped slips and pages.
Speaker 1: Each agreed that only the intended reader could connect meaningfully
Speaker 1: with what they'd found. As we gathered afterward in the
Speaker 1: main hall, Miriam observed, it seems expectation plays its own part.
Speaker 1: Those who want only blank find it. Those who yearn
Speaker 1: for a story, well, the shelf provides a mirror, not
Speaker 1: a window, Clara added, But even mirrors distort. Two readers,
Speaker 1: two meanings, one book, no gospel truth. I took this
Speaker 1: to heart. In subsequent days, we tried tandem readings, two readers,
Speaker 1: same book, moments apart. Each swore to see a different text,
Speaker 1: one a string of old family sayings, one an imaginary
Speaker 1: letter never finally sent, I gave up interceding simply listening.
Speaker 1: The phenomenon, I realized was increasingly paradoxical. It rewarded subjective
Speaker 1: anticipation but delivered objective specificity. It bent to expectation, but
Speaker 1: produced results that could not be conjured whole cloth by
Speaker 1: desire alone. The unwritten section was made real by the
Speaker 1: confluence of personal narrative, hope, memory, and communal tradition. In
Speaker 1: the following weeks, I set myself the task of synthesizing,
Speaker 1: Less concerned with forward motion and petty cataloging, more consumed
Speaker 1: by the warp and weft of human meaning. I revisited
Speaker 1: my notes, followed up quietly with experiment participants, and made
Speaker 1: one last sweep of archival records, names, dates, handwriting samples
Speaker 1: cross referenced with my growing stack of library note cards.
Speaker 1: Here s what surfaced. Stories folded into stories, generations echoing
Speaker 1: in the writing margins filled with corrections, predictions, revisions, fragments
Speaker 1: that matched public events before those events transpired. Family memories
Speaker 1: that spilled across households, occasionally contradicting public record, but never
Speaker 1: far from lived experience. In every tale, a pattern emerged.
Speaker 1: The unwritten section was less a casket for individual memory
Speaker 1: than a mirror for the city itself, its fears, its wishes,
Speaker 1: it its loose, overlapping potentialities. If memory is a trick,
Speaker 1: this shelf was its greatest performance. If tradition is a performance,
Speaker 1: this shelf was its consecrated stage. The effect was not
Speaker 1: merely archival, nor simply psychological, nor social nor mystical. It
Speaker 1: was a confluence. Like the city, with its roots in
Speaker 1: destroyed fortifications and burst pipes, and festivals layered in borrowed languages,
Speaker 1: the unwritten section stood as a living map, ever a written,
Speaker 1: a container for stories not yet inked, but urgently dreamed.
Speaker 1: I discovered one last passage near the close of my experiment,
Speaker 1: slipped into a book at the far left third shelf,
Speaker 1: up a letter in my own hand, but dated months.
Speaker 1: Hence I read to day we reconciled. I'd nearly given
Speaker 1: up hope, but you found me by the river. You said,
Speaker 1: we are all unfinished. The phrase struck deep. None of
Speaker 1: my journals yet contained that account. None of my habits
Speaker 1: prepared me for reading my own future in crisp blue ink.
Speaker 1: I closed the book, heart unsettled. I carried it to
Speaker 1: Clara and Miriam, who read in silence, then looked at me,
Speaker 1: not with suspicion, but with a gentle gravity. Miriam voiced
Speaker 1: what we'd all circled, never spoken. You see it now.
Speaker 1: I think this isn't for recording what was, or even
Speaker 1: for predicting. The shelf is a threshold, not what we've written,
Speaker 1: not what we will. It's what we're ready to read together.
Speaker 1: Clara added softer. All these years we've imagined archives as preservation.
Speaker 1: But maybe some stories wait, Maybe they grow in the anticipation.
Speaker 1: May be anything unwritten is only so until we need it.
Speaker 1: Even Javi, who clung to the practical, studied the page
Speaker 1: a long while. So the story is written, but only
Speaker 1: when someone's ready. I found myself unable to answer, not precisely.
Speaker 1: I felt instead the evocative tug of what the city
Speaker 1: founder must have meant. Not every thing that fills a
Speaker 1: book needs to be written before its read. For a moment,
Speaker 1: I saw how the library, the building, the people, the stories,
Speaker 1: the tradition was not a relic or an anomaly, but
Speaker 1: a living convergence. The unwritten section was the city's heart,
Speaker 1: mediating between what has happened what might and all that
Speaker 1: waits in the quiet, connective tissue between us. That realization
Speaker 1: washed through me, gentle, unhurried, wonder, eclipsed any urge to solve.
Speaker 1: I left the library in that mood, stepping carefully on
Speaker 1: to rain damp stone. The city seemed more porous. I
Speaker 1: passed neighbors greeted by name, alert now to the possibility
Speaker 1: that some story, some wish, some small grief or unyielding hope,
Speaker 1: might be quietly echoing, as yet unread, in tandem with
Speaker 1: my own ideas about authorship shifted not the solitary labor
Speaker 1: I had loved and protected, but a process, always incomplete,
Speaker 1: always shaped by the presence, sometimes merely the tential of
Speaker 1: another mind. As I passed my window, I watched the
Speaker 1: light fall over the silent desk, the idle note books,
Speaker 1: the piles of correspondence, and felt the humble privilege of
Speaker 1: being a part of something larger. Not a keeper of
Speaker 1: my own archive, but a scribe, a reader in a
Speaker 1: conversation far older, far more capacious than my own life.
Speaker 1: Back in my study, I retrieved a page I'd copied
Speaker 1: from an unwritten book, a tangle of words, partly mine,
Speaker 1: partly unknown, hints of things awaited or never quite spoken.
Speaker 1: The lines ran, there is a story here waiting. It
Speaker 1: knows me even as I am learning it. Without thinking,
Speaker 1: I placed my hand atop the page and felt, for
Speaker 1: a moment the vibration of something vast. I turned then
Speaker 1: to a fresh note book, empty, the cover cool beneath
Speaker 1: my finger tips. I left it open on the table, unwritten, patient,
Speaker 1: as if to suggest to invite the next word, the
Speaker 1: next moment, the next story that might want, when the
Speaker 1: time is right, to find its way into shape. If
Speaker 1: a book can know my life before I write it,
Speaker 1: how many stories are already waiting, quietly, unwritten for each
Speaker 1: of us. And that is the end. Thank you for listening,
Speaker 1: and I will see you in the next one.