There are always plenty of stories about the things we never talk about. That's not a contradiction. It's just the way things are.
So everyone knows about the Clockwork Book even though nobody talks about it.
The people who visit the Book are perplexed, or obsessed, or desperate, and sometimes they're all three. They Need To Know. And if you Need To Know, well... it's maddening to think that somewhere below your feet lies the Clockwork Book in the midst of its bookmaking machinery, calmly annotating the very thing you're after. This thought preys on your mind until, one day, you slip down the quiet street where a hatch opens onto a shaft that leads far below the city to a tunnel, at the end of which lies the Book.
The Book accumulates stories. It does this by trading the stories it knows for new stories. This sounds harmless: in fact, it sounds beneficial, until you think about it.
Because stories are not neutral. Stories always say something about the person who tells them. They often say more than the teller realizes, and it's easy to become so wrapped up in the telling that we tell too much.
Everything that the Book learns becomes part of the Book. And the Book grows by trading the stories it knows - to anybody who asks. Anybody. If that doesn't worry you, you're probably one of those people that natural selection hasn't noticed yet.
Over the many years since the Clockwork Book collected its first story people have gradually learned to avoid the Book despite the fact that, in general, people really want to know things. And there must be a reason.
There's a way to find out for certain, of course: you just have to be willing to as
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April 9th, 2012 at 7:21 pm
No one knows what ‘everyone knows’, because no one talks about it, because ‘everyone knows’ it.
