Seerstory (Essay‪)‬

The indoor rivers became a pool around the library, a design that was supposed to encourage us to end up there whenever our thoughts gathered weight. I beached myself in that archive more than was typical of someone who had the talent, however. Another reason to suspect I was a cloud that would pass without giving. My current failure was history. Marshall was trying to teach me a new version of it, but his gift was unusually strong, so he was able to leave most out. He didn't believe in accounts that included chronology, people or events, which didn't preserve much. Only raw concepts mattered to my teacher, and he described the way they mutated as they migrated from philosophy to species categorisation, or perhaps found a niche in physics. 'Think of precedence in terms of ideashapes,' he'd said. On the rare occasions when he mentioned a philosopher's name, it was solely to blame him (usually 'him') for breaking an important conceptual thread. Apparently Thomas Aquinas had a lot to answer for.