:060114: I have something, and my captors do not know it. It is a treasure. It is a library book, small and unassuming. A thick hardcover, but small nonetheless. There are no words on the front cover, not even any designs on the back cover. A sticker on the spine reads "shelved in closed stacks." Your ordinary library patron browsing through the books will never find it. They will also never find it because I have it. I intend to continue renewing it until they won't let me anymore (or at least until I've finished it, which seems to be taking me a while).
It is old. Very old. 109 in fact. Copywright 1897. It has that old-fashioned date-stamp sheet glued to the first page. The first stamp is September 27, 1977. It was only checked out 5 more times with stamps. The last one was July 8, 1991. When did the library switch over to computers? Maybe then, or maybe it's been shelved in closed stacks the whole time, and I am only the 7th person to ever check out this book. Three pages later, there is another date stamp, September 2, 1965. Is that when the library acquired the book? Perhaps. But for now it it mine. The pages are yellowed and they smell like dust. This book has spent some time in some sort of puddle because the first 147 pages have the same identical water mark.
This is no ordinary old book. Its age makes it fascinating alone, but how many books that old are actually interesting to read, as well? This one has a gem on almost every page.
"This ground beneath me is old as the Milky Way. Call it what you please, —clay, soil, dust: its names are but symbols of human sensations having nothing in common with it. Really it is nameless and unnamable, being a mass of energies, tendencies, infinite possibilities; for it was made by the beating of that shoreless Sea of Birth and Death whose surges billow unseen out of eternal Night to burst in foam of stars. Lifeless it is not: it feeds upon life, and visible life grows out of it."
Nice, eh? I shall keep it and keep it hidden until my captors figure it out.
It is old. Very old. 109 in fact. Copywright 1897. It has that old-fashioned date-stamp sheet glued to the first page. The first stamp is September 27, 1977. It was only checked out 5 more times with stamps. The last one was July 8, 1991. When did the library switch over to computers? Maybe then, or maybe it's been shelved in closed stacks the whole time, and I am only the 7th person to ever check out this book. Three pages later, there is another date stamp, September 2, 1965. Is that when the library acquired the book? Perhaps. But for now it it mine. The pages are yellowed and they smell like dust. This book has spent some time in some sort of puddle because the first 147 pages have the same identical water mark.
This is no ordinary old book. Its age makes it fascinating alone, but how many books that old are actually interesting to read, as well? This one has a gem on almost every page.
"This ground beneath me is old as the Milky Way. Call it what you please, —clay, soil, dust: its names are but symbols of human sensations having nothing in common with it. Really it is nameless and unnamable, being a mass of energies, tendencies, infinite possibilities; for it was made by the beating of that shoreless Sea of Birth and Death whose surges billow unseen out of eternal Night to burst in foam of stars. Lifeless it is not: it feeds upon life, and visible life grows out of it."
Nice, eh? I shall keep it and keep it hidden until my captors figure it out.
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