On Reading

A document is a thing that says something. To hear what it says:

> read welcome

You can read anything by name from anywhere. Names are flexible:

> read the letter       → finds west-wing/correspondence/the-letter
> read garden           → finds the-garden-of-forking-paths
> read maintenance      → finds on-the-maintenance-of-shelves

Variants

What happens when you read

Reading is not passive. Three things happen:

1. The text appears on your screen 2. The journal records that you read it 3. If the document has a Λ layer, that logic runs

Most documents are still — text and nothing more. But some are alive. The letter from the archivist writes to the journal. The erosion loses a line of its own text. The confession deletes itself.

You cannot tell by looking whether a document is alive. This is by design. In a library, you do not know whether a book will change you until you've read it.