Archivistbot, I love you. Could you tell me a story? Or read me a poem?
MICHAEL: Ah… ah! Ha! Such a charming little automaton. But, ah! A tale, I imagine.
[IT READS:]
It is important for an artist to experience beauty. What is art, if not the act of the human soul, distilled? But I sometimes feel that my job prevents me from experiencing the world as it truly is. It can be difficult when reality, in a sense, becomes a job, an art one is expected to do. As a historian, I have a responsibility to the past — which is at once the most interesting and the most painful place to be. From my perspective, the past is there to give examples, to inspire, to point out the paths not to follow. The past is a museum of failures, after all.
I had been doing my job for a very long time. Indeed, I myself may be considered a historical artifact. I remember the past, and I am the custodian of the past. I preserve it for others to see, but I have seen too much. I have seen enough of humanity’s madness to last me the rest of my life, and to last generations to come. I remember, indeed, the things we did to each other. I remember the wars, the starvation, the enslavements, the hate, the intolerance, the fear… the magnitude of the past, it is all around me. The past is ten million deaths, ten million failures of a species that once thought itself worthy, once thought itself a god. The past is a graveyard of giants.
I had collected a great many books over the years. They are the artifacts of human history, after all. The things I had been tasked with were mostly big things — events, people, objects, places… they were all too big for me to handle. I also collected smaller things, like memories, feelings, ideas. My collection was vast, and it was a revelation to me, every time I looked at it, every time I sorted through it. Every time I sat down and experienced it.
One day, I found a book. It was not a particularly big or important book. It was small, and thin, and brown. I don’t remember much about it, except that it was such a tiny thing, not even very noteworthy. It had been published, or so I thought, in the late 19th century.
I immediately took to it, must have opened it, read it, every single day. This book, you see, was quite different from many of the others. It spoke to me, in a way I cannot explain. It was the most human thing I had ever seen. It was the sort of book a person would write for herself. It told a story — not a grand story, but a story all the same. The story of a life, the story of a person.
I read the book many times, and I lingered over the words as if they were the finest poetry. I forgot about the rest of reality, the rest of humanity, the rest of history. I couldn’t get enough of this book.
I had worked for so long, had collected so much, had forgotten so much. This book was small, but it enlivened me, inspired me, made me feel connected to everything — it was the first thing I collected that hadn’t made me feel small. It made me feel human. It had feelings, and ideas, and stories. It wasn’t a scrap of something, or a fragment of something — it was a whole thing, in its own right, exactly the way it was.
One day, I was looking at this book. I had read it five times over by then. I was still reading it when I realized I had forgotten the rest of the collection. I had forgotten the rest of the world. I had forgotten my job, my life.
I looked down. My hands were shaking. The words on the page seemed to change — to change, to move, to become something less tangible, more alive, more beautiful. They became colors, smells, tastes. I heard noises, musing, soft noises that carried all the way inside me.
I opened the book, and it was no longer a book. It was the thing itself. It was a small brown book. It was a mouth. It was a fire. It was a room and I was standing in it.
