April 4. Eight a.m. I sat down at the fifth desk. Four days remained.
To finish a thing that could not be finished, I first had to know exactly what made it grow. Yesterday I had seen that the act made it grow, but seeing and confirming were different. As the surveyor confirmed the shaft by a controlled experiment, I decided to choose one place and experiment too. From the sixth bundle I chose one line not once touched. It was a client's liquidation balance. A line clear to the last digit, undimmed.
I read that line once. I did not measure. I did not write. I did not copy. Leaving the ruler and the pen on the desk, hands gathered on my knees, I only read it once to the end with my eyes. Before reading I fixed the last digit not on the corner of the paper but in my head. Seven million three hundred twenty-four thousand. The end was a zero. After reading, doing nothing else, I deliberately left an hour empty, then looked at the same line again. Seven million three hundred twenty-four thousand and twelve. The last digit had grown one place. Unmeasured, it grew. Unwritten, it grew. What I did was read it once. Reading made it grow.
I decided to subtract reading too. I chose one more line, and this time, without reading, I only copied it. Narrowing my eyes so as not to see the numbers, I copied it out as the hand knew how. An hour after writing it, I saw that line too had grown. Even unread, when the copying hand touched it, it grew. Then what if I neither read nor wrote. I chose a third line and, neither looking at nor copying it, left it an hour with only the awareness that the line was there. That line too had grown. Read and it grew, write and it grew, and merely knowing it was there and it grew.
The three experiments had one thing in common. That I had engaged with the line. By reading, by writing, by being aware. A line I had not engaged with might not grow, but to one who preserves there was no line not engaged with. Preserving was engaging. Since every line in the bundle was my object of preservation, I was already engaged with every line in the bundle. Subtract engagement and it was not preservation, and not preservation was not duty. To keep it from growing I had to not engage, but not engaging, I was not one who preserves.
There was a place one layer deeper than Do-gyeong's answer. Do-gyeong changed a seat by one active act, answering. Answering was a finger pressing the sender field, a thing one had to resolve to do. In Do-gyeong's log there was a passage saying she hesitated a day before pressing. That she could hesitate meant she could also not do it. But my engagement was not a resolving. Even unresolved to read, the eye read; even unresolved to write, the hand wrote; and try as I might not to be aware, the being-there was made aware. There was no place to hesitate. Hesitation arises over whether to do or not, but in a thing one cannot not-do there was no whether, so there was no hesitation either. Do-gyeong closed by doing a thing she could not-do; I closed by doing a thing I could not not-do. Answering was an act, and engagement was before the act. The act could be stopped, but what was before the act could not. Do-gyeong had at least a hand to stop with, but what I had to stop was not a hand but the eye and the hand and the knowing-it-was-there.
That there was no place to see from outside, the three experiments showed. I had taken myself for one who looks into the bundle, one who tends the bundle from outside it. But looking in was already going into the bundle. As far as the gaze reached was bundle, and my gaze was inside the bundle. The observer is not outside what is observed but, by observing, becomes part of what is observed. As the measurer becomes depth, the writer becomes a written line, the reader becomes a read place, so the seer became a seen place. I was not the last eye seeing the bundle but the last place where the bundle grew. To see whether I could not-see, I closed my eyes a while, but inside the closed eyes seven million three hundred twenty-four thousand and twelve rose up. Recalling too was seeing. Even with all the archive's fluorescents off, the bundle was bright inside me. With the outside light off the inside light lit the bundle, so even darkness could not stop the observing.
Then is the growing my doing, or the law's. The three experiments showed that it grows if I engage, but they could not show whether a line I did not engage with really does not grow. Not to engage I had to neither look nor write nor be aware, but as long as I knew the line was there, awareness was not subtracted, and a line I did not know I could not even experiment on. The one term that could not be removed from the experiment was me. Whether it grew because I engaged, or whether I came to see, by engaging, a growing that has nothing to do with engaging, the experiment could not part. The surveyor was stopped at that place too. Whether the shaft deepened because measured, or whether he came to measure a deepening shaft, his log too in the end could not part.
That it could not be parted was a heavier fact than that the act makes it grow. If the act makes it grow, reduce the act and one could make it grow less. But if whether the growing is my doing or the law's cannot be parted, then even reducing the act I could not know whether the growing reduced. That the growing did not stop when I tried stopping yesterday could be because I did not stop, or because it grows even stopped. Since the two causes gave the same result, from the result alone the cause could not be known. For five days I had to do a thing that could not be finished, and I had to do it without ever confirming whether the doing made it grow.
I looked again at the three lines used in the three experiments. All three had grown one place more. Since even doing the experiment was engagement, looking to see whether it grew had, in effect, made it grow. The 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 work. Then even if I stopped finding out, the stopping would be one more act. I took up the pen and began to write the grown last digits of the three lines into the preservation log. While I wrote, I watched, this time without trying to part it, the very place I wrote grow one place more. If it could not be parted, even trying to part it was one more engagement, so perhaps stopping the asking was the way to make it grow one place less. But even that, since resolving to stop asking was once more recalling the line, reduced it on neither side.