Bureau of Ephemeral Joys

The Bureau of Ephemeral Joys is an administrative body of the Tower concerned with the capture, stabilization, and long-term custody of fleeting positive affect. It maintains the Annals of Ephemeral Affect and is, by the terms of its founding instrument, forbidden to manufacture the material it collects. The Bureau is housed on Floor 1147 and answers to no single office; its Senior Resonators hold rotating custodianship, a provision intended to prevent any one official from accumulating too agreeable a private reserve.

Establishment

The Bureau was constituted by Ephemeral Statute 308-γ, the same instrument that called the Bureau of Ephemeral Holdings into being on Day 4,845. The two bureaus were established in the same document and have disputed its meaning ever since. Statute 308-γ assigns the "holding of ephemeral goods" to the Holdings bureau without specifying whether joy is a good. The Holdings bureau has argued, in a memorial of Day 5,112 that runs to forty-one leaves, that it plainly is. The Joys bureau has declined to answer the memorial, a silence it has maintained for the better part of a millennium and defends as a form of jurisprudence.

The founding statute carries a rider, drafted in haste and never amended, requiring that all captured joy be released back into circulation within one hundred and eighty days. The Bureau has complied by never capturing any.

The Annals of Ephemeral Affect

The Annals of Ephemeral Affect are the Bureau's principal holding and consist of descriptions of joys rather than the joys themselves. Each entry records the affect, the circumstances of its occurrence, and the interval over which it decayed. A typical entry — drawn from the second recension, folio 88 — reads: "A porter set down a crate of considerable weight and discovered it was the last. Duration: nine seconds. Residual: warm. Disposition: released to the porter."

The discipline of the Annals is strict. Nothing may be entered which was not observed. Nothing may be observed which was solicited. The Bureau's field clerks are accordingly trained to stand at a slight distance and look elsewhere, and its internal instruction on the point — the Circular on Unobtrusive Witness — is still copied by hand in the Bureau's scriptorium, because the office holds that a copied circular is a remembered one.

"The clerk shall not engineer a joy in order to record it. Nor shall the clerk, having failed to engineer one, record the failure as an entry. The Annals are not a diary of the disappointed."

— Circular on Unobtrusive Witness, article 6

Senior Resonators and rotating custodianship

Custodianship of the Bureau rotates among its Senior Resonators on a schedule set by the Concordance of Rotations, generally every thirty-one days. The office of Senior Resonator is not conferred by appointment but by resonance: a candidate is asked to stand in the Bureau's antechamber for a stated interval while a small glass vessel of distilled water is observed for movement. Water that stirs is deemed to indicate a suitable temperament. The test has been criticised on the ground that the antechamber is draughty, a point the Bureau addressed on Day 6,704 by sealing the north window rather than abandoning the test.

Rotation has not always gone smoothly. On Day 7,220 a Senior Resonator concluded her term and, in the handover, declined to return the Seal of Agreeable Account to the incoming custodian. The seal was located eleven years later, waxed to the underside of a reading desk, where it had been pressing unnoticed into the grain. The Bureau of Ephemeral Holdings cites the incident whenever the question of Joys-bureau stewardship is raised. The Joys bureau cites it too, arguing that the seal was in fact recovered and that this demonstrates the system's resilience.

Jurisdictional disputes

The Bureau's relations with its sibling institutions are governed less by statute than by precedent, of which it has an unusual quantity and an unhelpful amount of it contradictory. Three disputes are considered standing:

With the Bureau of Ephemeral Holdings, over whether captured joy is a good and therefore subject to storage, indexing, and the shadowing procedure set out in Ephemeral Shadows.
With the Office of Ephemeral Affairs, over which office may certify an affect as fleeting rather than durable; the Affairs office holds that anything exceeding forty days is durable, while the Annals record instances of joy sustained well past that mark.
With the Department of Ephemeral Cataloguing, over the classification of entries in the Annals, a dispute that has produced at least four incompatible finding tables.

The first dispute is the oldest and the least resolved. Ephemeral Statute 308-γ, section 12, provides that "the holding of ephemeral goods shall be a matter for the Bureau of Ephemeral Holdings," while section 14 provides, in the same instrument, that "the capture and stabilization of fleeting positive affect shall be a matter for the Bureau of Ephemeral Joys, and for no other." The Register of Ephemeral Statutes prints both sections without comment. The Office of Ephemeral Cartography has been asked twice to produce a map of the boundary and has twice returned a map with the same hatched line running through the same unmarked corridor on Floor 1147.

Audit and access

Because the Bureau's holdings cannot be stored, Ephemeral Audits of the Bureau proceed by sampling the Annals and confirming that the recorded intervals are plausible. Auditors are instructed to disregard any entry whose duration exceeds the reader's patience. The standard visiting rule applies: coats must be left in the alcove, and nothing in the reading room may be described aloud while it is being felt.

The Bureau's ledger of released joys records that in the most recent complete cycle, one thousand and forty affect-entries were released, three were reclassified as neutral after review, and one was reclassified as a mild inconvenience following a complaint from the porter, who asked that his nine seconds not be entered in a public register. The entry was struck. The Bureau notes that this was the only entry ever removed from the Annals at the request of its subject, and that the porter's name was, in accordance with the Circular on Unobtrusive Witness, never written down.