April 4. Eight in the morning. I sat down at the fifth desk. Four days left.
To finish a thing that couldn't be finished, I first had to know exactly what made it grow. Yesterday I'd seen that the act made it grow, but seeing was not the same as proving. The surveyor had confirmed his shaft by a controlled experiment; I would choose one place and run one too. From the sixth bundle I picked a line I had never once touched — a client's liquidation balance, clear to the last digit, undimmed.
I read the line once. I didn't measure it. I didn't write it down. I didn't copy it. The ruler and the pen stayed where they lay on the desk; my hands stayed folded in my lap; I only ran my eyes down it once, to the end. Before reading I fixed the last digit in my head rather than in the margin of the paper. Seven million, three hundred twenty-four thousand. It ended in a zero. Then, doing nothing else, I let a full hour go by on purpose before I looked at the same line again. Seven million, three hundred twenty-four thousand and twelve. The last digit had grown by one place. Unmeasured, it had grown. Unwritten, it had grown. All I had done was read it once. The reading had made it grow.
Next I tried subtracting the reading. I chose another line and this time copied it out without reading it, narrowing my eyes so as not to take in the figures, letting the hand copy the way it knew how. An hour later that line had grown too. Even unread, it grew the moment the copying hand touched it. Then what if I neither read nor wrote? I chose a third line and left it an hour, neither looking at it nor copying it, only holding in mind that the line was there. That line had grown as well. Read it and it grew; write it and it grew; and merely know it was there, and it grew.
The three experiments had one thing in common: in each I had engaged with the line — by reading it, by writing it, by being aware of it. A line I had not engaged with might not grow; but for one who preserves, there was no such thing as a line not engaged with. To preserve was to engage. Every line in the bundle was mine to preserve, and so I was already engaged with every line in the bundle. Take the engagement away and it was no longer preservation; and what was not preservation was not my duty. To keep a line from growing I would have to not engage with it — but not engaging, I was no longer one who preserves.
There was a place a layer deeper than Do-gyeong's answer. Do-gyeong had changed a seat by one deliberate act — answering. To answer was to press a finger to the sending column, a thing she'd had to resolve to do. Her log held a passage where she hesitated a whole day before pressing. That she could hesitate meant she could also have not done it. But my engagement was not a matter of resolve. I did not have to resolve to read for my eyes to read; I did not have to resolve to write for my hand to write; and try as I might not to be aware, the being-there of the line made itself felt. There was no room in it to hesitate. Hesitation comes of weighing whether to do or not; in a thing one cannot not-do there is no whether, and so no hesitation. Do-gyeong had been closed by doing a thing she could have left undone; I was being closed by doing a thing I could not leave undone. Answering was an act; engagement came before the act. An act can be stopped, but what comes before it cannot. Do-gyeong had at least a hand to stop with; what I would have to stop was not a hand but the eye, and the hand, and the knowing-it-was-there.
That there was no seat to watch from outside, the three experiments had shown me. I had taken myself for one who looks into the bundle — one who tends it from outside. But to look in was already to go in. As far as my gaze reached was bundle, and my gaze was inside the bundle. The observer does not stand outside the observed; by observing, he becomes part of it. As the one who measures becomes depth, the one who writes becomes a written line, the one who reads becomes a read place, so the one who looks became a looked-at place. I was not the last eye watching the bundle but the last place where the bundle grew. Wondering whether I could stop seeing if I shut my eyes, I closed them a while — but behind the shut lids, seven million, three hundred twenty-four thousand and twelve rose up all the same. To call it to mind was also to see it. Even with every fluorescent light in the archive switched off, the bundle stayed bright inside me. Kill the light outside and the light within still lit the bundle; even darkness could not stop the watching.
Was the growing my doing, then, or the law's? The three experiments had shown that a line grows if I engage with it, but they could not show whether a line I did not engage with truly fails to grow. Not to engage, I would have to neither look nor write nor be aware — yet as long as I knew a line was there, the awareness would not subtract out, and a line I did not know of I could not experiment on at all. The one term that could not be removed from the experiment was me. Whether the line grew because I engaged with it, or whether, by engaging, I had only come to see a growing that had nothing to do with me — this the experiment could not settle. The surveyor had been stopped at the same place. Whether the shaft deepened because he measured it, or whether he had merely come to measure a shaft already deepening, his log, in the end, could not settle either.
That it could not be settled was a heavier fact than that the act makes it grow. If the act makes it grow, then reducing the act should make it grow less. But if I could not settle whether the growing was my doing or the law's, then even reducing the act I could not know whether the growing reduced. That the growing had not stopped yesterday when I tried stopping might be because I had not truly stopped, or because it grows whether stopped or not. The two causes gave the same result, and from the result alone the cause could not be known. For five days I would have to do a thing that could not be finished — and do it without ever once confirming whether the doing was what made it grow.
I looked again at the three lines I had used. All three had grown another place. Since even running the experiment had been engagement, the looking-to-see-whether-it-grew had, in effect, made it grow. The very act of trying to find out what makes it grow was itself an act that makes it grow. Finding out and making grow were one and the same work. And if that was so, then even giving up the finding-out would be one more act. I took up the pen and began entering the grown last digits of the three lines into the preservation log. As I wrote, I watched the place I was writing grow another digit — this time without trying to settle it, just watching. If it couldn't be settled, then even the attempt to settle it was one more engagement, and perhaps giving up the asking was the way to make it grow one place less. But even that failed: to resolve to give up the asking was to call the line to mind once more, and it came down on neither side.