So I’m just going to read. This is the very opening of the book. If I read something from the later, it’s full of spoilers and vocabulary you don’t know yet so it seems like starting from the beginning it’s the way to do this. “Do your neighbors burn one another alive?†was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with artisan Flec. “Embarrassment befell me. Embarrassment is something I can feel in my flesh like a handful of sun-warmed mud clapped on my head. Do your shamans walk around on stilts?†Fraa Orolo asked reading from a leaf that judging by its brownness was at least five centuries old. Then he looked up and added helpfully, “you might call them pastors or witch doctors.†The embarrassment had turned to running. It was horrifying my scalp along a spreading frontier. When a child gets sick, do you pray? Sacrifice to a painted stick for blame it on an old lady? Now a sheeting warm down my face, clogging my ears and sanding my eyes. I could barely hear Fraa Orolo’s questions. “Do you fancy you will see your dead dogs and cats in some sort of afterlife?†Orolo had asked me along to serve as amanuensis. It was an impressive word so I’d said yes. He have heard than an artisan from extramuros had been allowed in to the new library to fix a rotted rafter that we could not reach with our ladders. It had only just been noticed and we didn’t have time to erect proper scaffolding before Apert. Orolo meant to interview that artisan and he wanted me to write down what happened. Through drizzly eyes I looked up the leaf in front of me. It was as blank as my brain. I was failing. But it was more important to take notes of what the artisan said. So far nothing. When the interview had begun, he had been dragging an insufficiently sharp thing over a flat rock. Now he was just staring at Orolo. “Has anyone you know ever been ritually mutilated because they were seen reading a book?†Artisan Flec closed his mouth for the first time in quite a while. I could tell that the next time he opened it he’d have something to say. I scratched at the edge of the leaf just to prove that my quill had not dried up. Fraa Orolo had gone quiet and he was looking at the artisan as if he were a new found nebula in the eyepiece of a telescope. Artisan Flec asked, “why don’t you just speell in?†Speel in,†Fraa Orolo repeated to me a few times as I was writing it down. I spoke in bursts because I was trying to write and talk at the same time. When I came, that is before I was collected, we – I mean they had a call thing called a spilly. We didn’t say it was “spill in.†We said cruise the speely. Out of consideration for the artisan, I chose to speak in Fleccish and so this staggering drunk of a sentence only sounded half as bad as if I’d said it in Orth. “It was a sort of moving picture,†Orolo gasped. He looked to the artisan and switched to Fleccish. We have guessed that to spill in means to partake of some moving picture proxies what you would call technology that prevails out there. “Moving picture that’s a funny way to say it,†said the artisan. He stared on the window as if it were a speely showing a historical documentary. He quivered with a silent laugh. “It is proxic Orth and so it sounds quaint to your ears,†Fraa Orolo admitted. Why don’t you just call it by its real name? Speeling in? Yeah, because when Fraa Erasmus here came into the math ten years ago, it was called cruising the speely and when I came in almost 30 ago, we called it fire spark. The avowed who live on the other side of yonder wall who celebrated apert only once every hundred years would know it by some other name. I would not be able to talk to them. Artisan Flec had not taken another word after fire spark. “Fire spark is completely different,†he said. You can’t watch fire spark content on a spilly. You have to up converted and reparse the format. Fraa Orolo was as bored by that as the artisan was by a talk of the hundred years and so conversation thudded to a stop long enough for me to scratch it down. My embarrassment had gone away without my noticing it as with hiccups. Artisan Flec, believing that the conversation was finally over, turns to look at the scaffolding that his men had erected beneath the bad rafter. To answer your question, Fraa Orolo began. “What question?†“The one you posed just a minute ago. If I want to know what things are like extramuros, why don’t I just speel in?†“Oh,†said the artisan, a little confounded by the length of Fraa Orolo’s attention span. I suffer from attention surplus disorder, Fraa Orolo like to say as if it were funny. “First of all, Fraa Orolo said, we don’t have a speely device.†“Speely device?†Waving his hand as if this would dispel clouds of linguistic confusion, Orolo said, “whatever artifact you use to speel in. If you have an old fire spark resonator, I could bring you a down converter that’s been sitting in my junk pile.†“We don’t have a fire spark resonator either,†said Fraa Orolo. “Why don’t you just buy one?†This gave Orlow a pause. I could sense a new set of embarrassing questions stocking up in his mind. “Do you believe that we have money? That the reason we are protected by the secular power is because we are sitting on a treasure hoard? That our Millenarians know how to convert base metals to gold?†But Fraa Orolo mastered the urge. Living as we do under the Cartesian discipline, our only media are chalk, ink, and stone, he said. But there is another reason too. “Yeah, what is it?,†demanded artisan Flec barely provoked by Fraa Orolo’s freakish habit of announcing what he was about to say instead of just coming out and saying it. “Well, it’s hard to explain but for me just aiming a speely input device or fire spark chamber or whatever you call it. A speelycaptor at something doesn’t collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses. Mix it around in their head and make it over into words.†“Words,†the artisan echoed and then aimed sharp looks all around the library. “Tomorrow, Quinn’s is coming instead of me,†he announced and then added a little bit defensively, “I have to counterstrafe the new klanax recompensators. The fan out free is starting to look a bit clumpy if you ask me.†“I have no idea what that means,†Orolo marveled. “Never mind, you ask him all your questions. He’s got the gift of Gab.†And for the third time in these many minutes, the artisan looked at the screen of his Ji-ja who insists that he shut down all of its communication’s functions but it still served as a pocket watch. He didn’t seem to realize that in plain sight out the window was a clock 500 feet high. I’d put a full stop at the end of the sentence and aimed my face at a bookshelf because I was afraid that I might look amused. There was something in the way he’d said “Quinn’s coming instead of me†that made it seem he just decided it on the spot. Fraa Orolo had probably caught it too. If I made a mistake of looking at him, I would laugh and he wouldn’t. The clock began chiming provenur. “That’s me,†I said then I added for the benefit of the artisan, “apologies, I must go wind the clock.†“I was wondering,†he said. He reached into his tool box and took out a polly bag, blew off saw dust undid its seal which was of a type I had never seen before and withdrew a silver tube the size of his finger. Then he looked at Fraa Orolo hopefully. “I don’t know what that is and I don’t understand what you want,†said Fraa Orolo. “A speelycaptor!†“Ah, you have heard about provenur and as long as you are here, you’d like to view it and make a moving picture?†The artisan nodded. “That will be acceptable provided you stand where you are told. Don’t turn it on.†Fraa Orolo raised his hands and got ready to avert his gaze. The world regulant will hear of it shall make me do penance. I’ll send you to the Ika, they’ll show you where to go. And more in disdain for the discipline who has made up of many rules and we had already made a model of them in artisan Flec’s mind by allowing him to venture into the Decenarian math. I’ve been using my sphere as a stool. I trace counter clockwise circles on it with my fingertips and it shrunk until I could palm it. My bolt had shifted while I’ve been sitting. I pulled it up and yank to the pleats spade as I careered around tables, chairs, globes, and slow moving frost. I passed under a stone arch into this cryptorium, the place now richly of ink maybe because an ancient fraa and his two fids were copying out books there but I wonder how long it would take to stop smelling that way if no one ever used it at all. A lot of ink has been spent there and the wet smell of it must be deep into everything. At the other end, a smaller doorway led to the old library which was one of the original buildings that stood right on the cloister It’s stone floor 2300 years old than that of the new library was so smooth under the soles of my feet that I could scarcely feel it. I could have found my way with my eyes closed by letting my feet read the memory worn into it by those gone before. The cluster was a roofed gallery around the perimeter of a rectangular garden. On the inner side, nothing separated it from our weather except the row of columns that held up its roof. On the outer side, it was bounded by a wall openings in which gave way to buildings such as the old library, the refectory and various charcoals. Every object I passed the carved bookcase ends, the stones locked together to make the floor, the frames at the windows, the foraged hinges of the doors and the handmade nails that fasten them to the wood, the capitals of the columns that surrounded the place, the pads and bed of the garment itself, everyone had been made in a particular form by a clever person a long time ago. Some of them such as the doors of the old library had consumed the whole lifetime to those who had wrought them. Others looked as though they’d been tossed off in an idle afternoon but with such off sight that they had been cherished for a hundreds or thousands of years. Some were founded on pure simple geometry. Others reveled in complication and it was a sort of a riddle whether there was any rule governing their forms. Still others were the pictures of actual people who had lived and thought interesting things at one time or another or barring that of general types. The diolator, the physiologer, the burglar, and the slime. If someone had asked, I might not be able to explain a quarter of them. One day, I’d be able to explain them all. So that’s the opening of the Anathem. It’s being narrated by a roughly eighteen- year old avowed which means somebody who has literally sworn a vow to live in this place called the math which is build around the giant clock and has a wall in it pierce by a gate that opens once every ten years. So by definition of the people who lived there, people who decided that they only have contact with the outside world every ten years or so and the society in this world, they tend to be the literate people, the scientist, the mathematician and so on. I’ve been working on this project for three or four years now and in the early going as a way of getting into the mood, I would go to concerts of medieval and renaissance music whenever I could in Seattle area and that meant frequently attending concerts by a couple of groups called Capella Romana. That’s a Portland-based group that does byzantine chant and the tudor choir which is a Seattle- based group that does renaissance polyphony kind of similar to the Talent Scholars if you know who they are. So a couple of years ago I was going out to dinner with David Stutz, a friend of mine, ex-Microsoft person who is retired and now works as a professional musician and he and our wives will go into a concert of a group called Trio Medieval which again as you can guess from the name does really acapella choral music and I – over a couple of bottles of wine, explain the perimeters of this book. And we spun out an idea that I assumed would disappear and never been heard of again after we sobered up which was that’ll be amusing to try to actually create the music that the avowed, the people in this Constants would actually make and structurally, it might have a lot in common with medieval liturgical music of the planet earth but the key difference is that instead glorifying a religious idea, this music would have the purpose of glorifying some idea from mathematics or science or philosophy that the avowed felt to be particularly beautiful. And David went to work on that and has composed a number of pieces which are being released today on a CD that is available through the Long Now Foundation. All profits from the sale of the CD once we’ve recoup the fairly minimal cost of production are going to the Long Now Foundation and David is here this evening with some of the singers who performed on the CD. You’ve already heard a couple of pieces. All of them are built around anathematical themes except for one called the Lament for the Third Sack which is a historical piece. So we’re going to use – we’re going to have performances by the singers as interludes between the other parts of the program today and I can’t remember which piece is next but we’re going to transition to that now.
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