November 5. Last night I closed the box and left it as it was.
After my hand stopped at half past five I sat there some twenty minutes. I could have taken it out. I could have only counted. I did nothing and closed it.
This morning I tried to write down why I closed it and could not. The form has no box for why.
At half past nine I set the box down on the floor and laid out the six.
The lighthouse keeper, the survey chainman, the telegraphist, the librarian. The four have been there since January. There is one notebook and it has been there since January too. The sixth came yesterday.
The four are handwritten logs stitched together. They have covers and the press's seal inside the front cover and beneath the last page of each the same single line is set. The notebook is one exercise book. It has a cover and on the inside of the back cover there are seal impressions.
The sixth has no cover. The first page is writing at once.
The paper is company ruled stock. It was used in the archive and the same is still in the third bay of the stacks. At the foot of each page on the right a number is written by hand. There are two inks. Blue is the greater part, and black is mixed in toward the back.
At the top right of the first page there is one name.
From ten until eleven I read the first twelve pages.
There were no boxes.
It is continuous prose from beginning to end. Even where a number is set down there are no boxes. The number copied and the number in the original are set side by side and beneath them, in prose, what was done and how.
On the third page there is a line like this. The number I copied today is greater than the original. I counted three times and it is greater all three. If the hand were wrong it would have to be wrong the same way all three times.
On the eighth page there is a line like this. The place I corrected yesterday has become two today.
That is the sentence I wrote in July. I wrote that the one I added yesterday is three today. Three and two differ and the rest is the same.
On the first page there is the matter of a box. A box came from a publishing house that had ceased trading, and inside, it is written, were four bundles. The date of receipt is the twenty-seventh of October 97.
That box is under my desk now. Two years ago it was four and today it is six.
I read until eleven and stopped my hand.
My log has boxes and nine sentences outside them. The right-hand log has boxes and seventeen sentences outside them. This bundle has no boxes.
Then all of it is outside.
There is no counting it. What can be counted is only where there are boxes. There must be boxes for there to be an inside and an outside, and what is outside can be counted. Where there are no boxes there is no outside and no count.
Having written that it cannot be computed, I looked again at the grounds I raised three days ago.
That what goes outside the boxes is a person. Yesterday I wrote that those grounds do not tell the right side from the left. Today they fail to tell one more.
By those grounds this bundle is the most a person. Not one line is inside a box.
And by the same grounds the four bundles are people. None of the four has boxes. The people of those four are people of more than sixty years ago, and what became of them afterward is written in none of the four. The lighthouse keeper's last page breaks at a line of the tide table and the telegraphist's ends at a line with only a time on it.
The grounds do not tell a living person from one who has gone. For eight months in this room, every time I have raised grounds, the grounds have joined the two they were raised to tell apart.
At half past eleven I went down to the stacks and took out the 1997 paper register.
Eighty-two lines have a name in the writer's box. I counted them last month.
I chose ten characters and compared them with the writing in the bundle.
They were the same.
The hook of the character gyeong runs long to the right. It does so in all eighty-two lines and it does so in the bundle. The first stroke of do is short and the second long. That is the same too. The register is in brush pen and the bundle in ballpoint, so the thickness of the line differs. The thickness differs and the place it runs out is the same.
For a month Kim Do-gyeong was a set of characters inside a box. On the screen it was type and on paper it was handwriting, and that handwriting was inside a box as well. Writing inside a box is a name, and a name marks only the place of a person.
Today that hand wrote twelve pages outside the boxes.
I have not met a person. I have met a hand.
On the seventeenth of October I set down personnel, the roll, and the floor in order and wrote that there was nowhere left to ask. What remained then was the register. Today one has been added and this is not somewhere to ask either. When what is written increases, the questions increase and the places to ask do not.
From one until three I did cards. I did two hundred. Some four hundred remain in the twelfth drawer and two days will finish it.
At two the third floor telephoned. They asked what had become of that item dated the thirty-first of October. I said head office had decided to put it into the end-of-November clearing guidance. He asked whether it would then stand in the register until that time. I said it would. He said very well and hung up.
That line has stood thirty-six days.
At three I opened the notebook.
On the inside of the back cover there are seal impressions. In January I counted them and wrote five. In July I counted six, and the sixth was shallower than the five before it and had no ink.
Counted today they are six.
From half past three until half past four I matched the impressions against the articles.
In January there were five things in this box. The four bundles and the notebook. The impressions were five then.
In July the impressions became six. The things were five then.
Yesterday the things became six.
The impressions were six a hundred and seven days earlier.
Having written a hundred and seven days earlier, I tried to settle whom the sixth impression belongs to.
If it belongs to the bundle that came yesterday, the impression came before the thing. In this room that has happened many times in eight months. The copy wrote a day first, the catalogue showed first, the access record was stamped first. Stand the sixth impression in that line and it sits right.
If it is mine, the impression came into being in July and the thing is not yet in this box. My log is in the third-floor cabinet and it is a hundred and seventy-six pages.
Both sit right. There are no grounds to choose one.
Looking at the impressions, a third came to me. It may belong to whoever wrote the notebook. The notebook has been here since January and the impressions were five then, so one of those five may be that person's. Then the sixth is empty again, and six things agreeing with six impressions becomes a coincidence.
Set down, all three reckon out.
At ten past five I opened the right-hand material.
It was a hundred and seventy-six pages.
The page added is dated the eighteenth of December 97. The displayed end date stands at the sixteenth of December. It has gone two days past.
At twenty past five I took out the registration form.
An unregistered article has been added, and what is added must be registered. The form has a period box. It is a box for the date of the first page and the date of the last.
I opened the first page. The twenty-seventh of October 97.
I turned from the back to find the last page.
The last page with writing came up.
The date is the sixteenth of December.
The year box was empty.
There are two sixteenths of December in this room. The end date of the right-hand material is the sixteenth of December 97 and the notebook's last day is the sixteenth of December 98.
This bundle's sixteenth is fastened to neither year.