January 25. I have used the boxes I copied for nineteen days.
From half past nine until eleven I counted up twenty days' worth.
There are twenty-seven rows.
Not one a day. There are five days with none and two days with three. I wrote on the days there was something to write.
I counted the box for whether it has ended. Twenty-two have not ended and five are unknown.
There is no has ended.
Three things came to this room in the twenty days.
One is the reply on the recorder list. A note came that the first four of the six are not names and that they are to be completed with names. I replied that there is nowhere to complete them from. Head office said then to amend them to unknown. Amended to unknown, the four merge into one line in the list.
Merge four into one line and six becomes three. I have written that up and sent it and am waiting for a reply.
One is the remaining six items of the post-rollover inspection. I submitted all as no abnormality.
One is a notice. It says that from March some of the materials held will be put up for outside-network reading. It says the selection will be notified later.
From half past eleven until one I read the twenty-seven box by box.
In the box for whether it is a first, nine are marked applicable. That does not mean there were nine things in twenty days I had wanted to call a first in twelve months. The box being there, one comes to look each time at whether a thing is a first, and looking, firsts come to the eye.
In the box for the circumstances of entry there is something written in all of them. Until now the form held only results. There was no box for what stood before a result, so only the result remained, and a record of results alone was always unreadable later in eight months.
In the box for recollection, none appears three times. All three concern paper. Paper has no access record.
One thing has changed since I began using the box for recollection. Until now recollection had nowhere to be written, so it did not enter the count. Not entering, its being out of true was not a being out of true. Now it enters a box, and what is out of true counts as three.
Counted, those three remain. Remaining, they come to be set against the next. Since making a box, one more thing remains in this room.
In the box for precedence, four have two opposed bases. In all four one side is paper and one side a screen.
At half past one I looked at the form again from the beginning.
There were six boxes.
The sixth box is to the right of the fifth. The line is my line. It was ruled with a straight edge and is the same thickness as the other five.
There is a name written on it.
The number who read.
I saw those words in July. The first time was in the figure cell of the copy, and then I counted by adding up the views of the board posts. At the foot of the query screen there is a field of the same name, and a separate number was in it. I looked at that number all morning and it increased while I looked. Counting is being counted, I wrote that day.
At half past two I took out the notebook.
I opened page sixty-three.
There are five boxes.
I counted three times. Five. The heading is as it was and the place where the line bends is as it was.
The original is five and the copy is six.
At twenty to three I read again the entry of the day I copied it. It says that at four on the sixth of January it was ruled with a straight edge and took twelve minutes. It says the boxes are five. Writing the first row that day, I entered five in five boxes.
The sixth box of that row is empty. All twenty-seven rows are empty.
The boxes are six and what is filled is always five. Filling them I did not see that a sixth was there. For twenty days I opened this face once a day and wrote in five boxes and my hand passed over the sixth.
For eight months in this room the side that increased was always the side copied onto. The film increased, the files increased, the copy increased. The original has not increased once.
That law holds for boxes too.
From three until four I set the first five against the sixth.
The five are things I had written in the log as absent. I wrote whether a thing is a first in October, and why in November, and recollection and precedence in November, and whether it has ended in January. All five have a day on which they were written.
The sixth has none.
In twelve and a half months there is nowhere in this log that says there is no box for the reader. That field was already on the query screen. Having never written it as absent, that box did not come from my side.
At ten past four I tried to write down what this is.
The first five are boxes that let me write what I could not. Questions I had written down came back as boxes.
The sixth is what I did not ask.
A thing asked becoming a box and a thing unasked becoming a box are different. The asked coming back is explained if I say I copied it from somewhere. The unasked must have somewhere to be copied from.
The query screen is somewhere. That field is on the screen. It is explained if I say I looked at the screen and drew it.
The explanation is beside it again. There is one place it does not cover.
The first five are not on the screen. Only the sixth is. Had I drawn from the screen I would have drawn the six and not the five.
At half past four the third-floor man came down and took a signature. He asked what it is I am always writing. I said I am using a form. He asked whether it came from head office.
I said it did not.
He laughed and asked then why I use it. I said there was nowhere to write and so I made it. He said is there such a thing, and went up.
After he went up I wrote that in the form. What goes in the box for circumstances of entry is that remark. It is a remark I would not have written without the box, and unwritten it would be gone from what happened today.
At twenty to five I opened the right-hand material.
It was two hundred and forty-five pages. The page added is dated the twenty-fifth of February 98.
There was no sentence outside the boxes on that page. Lately there are more days with none.
I counted the fifth bundle too. A hundred and seventy-seven pages. It has not grown for forty days.
Two things do not grow. The notebook's boxes and this bundle's pages. Both are paper and both are inside the box.
The things outside the box grow.
At five I opened the query screen and looked at that field at the foot.
It is twenty-three.
When I first saw it in July it was twelve. Eleven have been added in six months.
In the sixth box I wrote twenty-three.
Having written it I looked at the screen again.
It was twenty-four.