Post by jackoat on Mar 5, 2020 9:50:09 GMT -5
March 5, 2020
Happy Thursday, friend!
I’m afraid I’m going to start sounding like a broken record! “The strangest thing happened to me today” or “I noticed the strangest thing.” Everywhere I look these days I am confronted with what is unquestionably the weirdest and most unsettling — or wonderful — phenomena I have ever seen. The bookmoths, for instance, really threw me for a loop. When you think “moth,” you think of something small and fragile with fuzzy antennas, being drawn to a flame. The creatures I know have wingbeats you can hear, and can cast shadows that send lesser creatures (me included) scurrying for cover. The Librarian of Beginnings has even shown me a few scales he’s found in the deeper Stacks, which suggest bookmoths of a size that… honestly, I don’t like to think about it very hard.
All of this is all to say: it’s extremely peculiar here, and I am gradually getting used to having my sense of reality shaken apart every few minutes. But something here has begun to bother me. Not because it’s dangerous (I don’t think), but because it just… makes me uncomfortable. It’s like there’s a grain of sand in my eye except instead of my eye it’s my brain. Look, it’s not a perfect metaphor. It’s an itchy thought that won’t leave me alone, and the more I think about it the worse it feels.
Ever since I got here, I haven’t been able to tell the time. It took me a little while to notice at first, because there are so many other kinds of structures here, like duties to be carried our in a particular order or creatures with specific habits. But what time it is, or what time any of those things take place? I haven’t the faintest idea. I have no sense of how much time is passing or what time of day it is, whether what I am eating is dinner or breakfast. It gives me the strangest… floating feeling, as though I am suspended. Instead of being carried along by a current, I’m becalmed.
And it’s not that there aren’t any clocks in the Library — it’s quite the opposite. Clocks seem to be everywhere, with different aesthetics and mechanisms. Some are powered by quartz or water, the tension of a key or the pull of gravity. They seem to come from many different time periods, and some must be very old. There’s a massive contraption with these giant, toothed wheels; a red and white and gold water room that houses a water clock; a huge, ornate structure with life-sized figures that joust and dance. Others are much harder to recognize, either because of their strangeness or state of disrepair. But every single one of them works, to one degree or another, grinding or humming or dripping along.
Whatever they keep, however, it doesn’t seem to be time, and that’s freaking me out a little.
Best,
Alice
Apprentice (of sorts)
The Boundless Library
Happy Thursday, friend!
I’m afraid I’m going to start sounding like a broken record! “The strangest thing happened to me today” or “I noticed the strangest thing.” Everywhere I look these days I am confronted with what is unquestionably the weirdest and most unsettling — or wonderful — phenomena I have ever seen. The bookmoths, for instance, really threw me for a loop. When you think “moth,” you think of something small and fragile with fuzzy antennas, being drawn to a flame. The creatures I know have wingbeats you can hear, and can cast shadows that send lesser creatures (me included) scurrying for cover. The Librarian of Beginnings has even shown me a few scales he’s found in the deeper Stacks, which suggest bookmoths of a size that… honestly, I don’t like to think about it very hard.
All of this is all to say: it’s extremely peculiar here, and I am gradually getting used to having my sense of reality shaken apart every few minutes. But something here has begun to bother me. Not because it’s dangerous (I don’t think), but because it just… makes me uncomfortable. It’s like there’s a grain of sand in my eye except instead of my eye it’s my brain. Look, it’s not a perfect metaphor. It’s an itchy thought that won’t leave me alone, and the more I think about it the worse it feels.
Ever since I got here, I haven’t been able to tell the time. It took me a little while to notice at first, because there are so many other kinds of structures here, like duties to be carried our in a particular order or creatures with specific habits. But what time it is, or what time any of those things take place? I haven’t the faintest idea. I have no sense of how much time is passing or what time of day it is, whether what I am eating is dinner or breakfast. It gives me the strangest… floating feeling, as though I am suspended. Instead of being carried along by a current, I’m becalmed.
And it’s not that there aren’t any clocks in the Library — it’s quite the opposite. Clocks seem to be everywhere, with different aesthetics and mechanisms. Some are powered by quartz or water, the tension of a key or the pull of gravity. They seem to come from many different time periods, and some must be very old. There’s a massive contraption with these giant, toothed wheels; a red and white and gold water room that houses a water clock; a huge, ornate structure with life-sized figures that joust and dance. Others are much harder to recognize, either because of their strangeness or state of disrepair. But every single one of them works, to one degree or another, grinding or humming or dripping along.
Whatever they keep, however, it doesn’t seem to be time, and that’s freaking me out a little.
Best,
Alice
Apprentice (of sorts)
The Boundless Library