Today I left my son in an overground climate-controlled bubble, doing things with other Earthlings, and walked over land to a subterranean chamber I know, where someone had told me I could obtain a magic token to get a treasure I spied last week.
So I went into the subterranean chamber and said to the persons I found in the first room that I heard there were magic tokens in this subterranean chamber and they said, "never heard of it," and I said, "please, couldn't you look it up for me? someone said the magic token place is here." So then with a little more convincing the male human in the subterranean chamber was going to his googlemachine to look it up but he realized of /course/ he knew where the magic token subchamber was, down the hall and on the right.
So I went there and said, "can I have a magic token please? I used to have a magic token for this place, and there is treasure that I want in another subterranean chamber." And they said "okay, sit here and we'll take your picture and we'll update your sleeping chamber coordinates." And the female human told the other female human she printed the wrong colour magic token but oh well, it was fine.
So I took the magic token I had got and walked overland to the place of the other subterranean chamber with the treasure in it, dodging frisbees and other humans and getting extra sun energy. And I went into the aboveground chamber and said, "in your subterranean chamber is a treasure and I want to borrow it please and they told me in the magic token chamber that you have to authorize me" and they said they would authorize me and that they wanted to see this treasure they had in the basement. So they did. And I showed them.
And I was only planning to take one piece of the old precious treasure they had, but they said, "borrow all three! Why not! It's not like anybody else even realizes we have 162 year old treasure in our subterranean chamber, they're all after the new shiny treasure. And you might want to compare the volumes."
And then on the shelf below was a book called "How Does The Earth Work?" and I said to the librarian, "hey, I wrote 4,000 questions for the computer databank for that texbook once, that was a really fun job," and then we had like another half hour conversation about cool jobs and university education these days and about just how privileged it is to be able to hang around at the university and how hyper-super-rich a lot of students are these days and about all the people who can't get in and what else they might do.
But wow, what a marvel. I can just go get an alumni card and bring home a book older than Canada. For free. This is a remarkable thing. And how lucky, lucky, lucky I am that I got to go to university when it was affordable and fairly easy to get in.
And then I went back to the aboveground bubble and showed son, "look, here is the treasure we saw earlier this week, I get to bring it home!!"
It's all handmade with gold leaf, real gold leaf, on the outside. Made in leather. A thing of true beauty, and the writing is a plain-speaking, humble treat. The pages, in contrast to some of the raggedly cut pages my son has been delighted to have in novels these days, actually were cut with a razor by a real human hand 162 years ago. The colour illustrations, which the author let us know the publisher insisted on having high quality, were done by an Irish friend. True things of beauty that have that tracing paper cover to protect them.
I just lusted to read the rest of this book like something I haven't in a long time. There's so much happiness to be found in stacks and stacks of books. Now just to finish getting these three books I'm publishing just now, under cover and to the printers, and then I will lose myself in its beauty. And the ones the author wrote later in his career too, since I now have all three volumes chez moi. Incroyable.
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