I'm thinking, can't you tell?

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

– Jesus of Nazareth

We lost data. Thieves, er, broke through and stole. Don't worry: we've got a lot of it backed up and we'll be reinserting it, by hook or crook, in the weeks to come. You'll be able to read those novellas in their entirety. (In the meantime, keep up with the ongoing stories, chapter 18 this week.) But it's frustrating. There's a tendency to think of those pixels as sacrosanct.

The sword of Charlemagne the Just

Is Ferric Oxide, known as rust.

The grizzly bear, whose potent hug,

Was feared by all, is now a rug…

– Arthur Guiterman, 'On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness'

There's a thing that happens when you're studying old manuscripts, which I did once upon a time. You're looking at a really exciting old text (stop yawning) and trying to translate it from the Middle Lower Franconian, or whatever, and suddenly you can't for the life of you tell what the author meant the next word to be.

Because there are two or three letters missing.

'A lacuna!' you yelp. Lacunae are bad news. They are annoying. They cause arguments. Papers get written. Footnotes abound. Fights break out at academic seminars. This is how feuds get started.

And what caused this lacuna, you may ask? As well you might.

A mouse, probably.

Mice like to chew on manuscripts. They're yummy. They're made of parchment or vellum. Mice are to parchment what moths are to your jumpers. This is what cats are for besides decorating the internet.

'Oh,' you say. 'It's a bad idea to write on such ephemeral materials. Besides, it's bad for the sheep and cows. What did people use before parchment?' Er, papyrus. You sometimes luck up and find something wonderful like this.

This is considered a splendid find. It has whole words on it. (Believe it or not, it's useful.) Want to see worse? Go look at the Oxyrhynchus papyri if you want a headache. Time does things to reed paper.

'Oh, then, we need to carve things on wood.' One word: termites.

'Stone is immutable, surely.' Bah, the next pharaoh erased your legacy with a chisel, the creep. See what I mean? Moth and rust do corrupt, and thieves, in the form of hostile (or politically correct) descendants and cyberpirates do break in and steal.

So why bother? Why put words and images together at all? To communicate. To cast metaphorical bread upon the waters. To gather our own thoughts for what they do to our mind, which after all is our own personal work-in-progress. I've got books on my shelves that represent thoughts from long ago. I can either mourn for those that have been lost over the centuries, or I can appreciate the ones I've got and rejoice in random discoveries. A few of those books are print versions of my own and those I've edited from other h2g2ers. There may be fewer of those out and about, but they're here, in my house. They are also online, some of them.

If you believe in the Akashic Record, then they're also on file somewhere in the non-electronic cloud: the noosphere, if you will. If so, it is impossible to completely erase the works of our minds even if all the moths, rust, and chisels have obliterated the works of our hands.

In other words, keep writing, drawing, filming, composing, and taking pictures, people. We'll do something with them.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

20.03.23 Front Page

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