Font of Lost Quotations

The Font of Lost Quotations is a minor spring-fed basin on the ninth landing of the Scriptorium of Lost Roots, formally designated Holding 9-k-4 under the schedule of the Fourth Concordance. It is approximately two metres in diameter and eleven centimetres deep, and its waters hold what the custodial office describes as "phrases severed from their attributions" — sentences, half-sentences, and cadences that were once spoken or written in the Tower and have since lost the name of whoever said them. The Font does not preserve texts. It preserves the sound of texts, and only the pressure of a fingertip is sufficient to draw one up.

Description and behaviour

The Font is fed by seepage through the landing floor and is remarkable chiefly for the behaviour of its surface, which does not reflect. Visitors report instead a faint rippling of the sort produced by a voice just out of hearing. Drawings made at the Font by the Scriptorium's draftsmen show a plane of water with the quill-strokes of an unseen hand passing across it, and these drawings have been reproduced in every survey of the ninth landing since the Third Concordance.

The water is drawn up by contact, not by immersion. A fingertip laid flat on the surface raises a single quotation, which surfaces as a spoken phrase of between four and nine words and is audible only to the person touching the water. Longer enquiries require a second finger and are discouraged; the custodial notice at the landing, sealed under the office of the Librarians, reads: "Two fingers draw a sentence. Three draw an argument, and the argument is not always the visitor's."

"No one who has asked the Font for a full paragraph has afterwards been able to say what the paragraph was about, only that it was not fair."

— Archive of Lost Protocols, Protocol 12 (Conduct at Contact Springs)

Contents and the problem of attribution

What the Font yields is almost never useful and is never complete. The most commonly drawn phrase, recorded in the Lost Sensations Archive in the winter of the year the ninth landing was refloored, is "as I was saying before the interruption" — a fragment with no register, no addressee, and no antecedent. The second most common is a closing clause: "and that is why it must not be written down."

The Font's holdings are held to be the residue of the Tower's Archive of Lost Conversation, though the relationship between the two holdings has never been settled to the satisfaction of either custodian. The Archive's keepers contend that a quotation severed from its attribution belongs to the Archive by right of subject; the Scriptorium contends that it belongs to the landing on which it surfaces, by right of situs. The Lost Concordance Faction has entered the dispute twice and withdrawn both times, on the grounds that its own recensions cannot be relied upon at the ninth landing.

Custody and the dispute of Annex 9

Custody of the Font is assigned by Third Concordance, Annex 9, to "the office nearest in descent," a phrase that has been read three ways since the Annex was sealed:

• The office nearest the Font by staircase, which is the Scriptorium of Lost Roots;
• The office nearest the Font by descent of authority, which the Librarians identify as themselves;
• The office nearest the Font in genealogical descent from the founding custodians of the ninth landing, a line that no one has been able to trace past its fourth generation.

In practice the Scriptorium draws the water, the Librarians seal the notice, and the Physickers of the Deep Font are consulted whenever the surface behaves unusually. The Physickers have never claimed custody and have twice declined it in writing, on the grounds that their charter concerns the Font of Forgetting and they "do not take on a second spring in a decade."

Scholarly opinion divides on whether the Font of Lost Quotations and the Font of Unwritten Definitions are connected. The Physickers maintain that no physical corollary of the latter has been identified anywhere in the Tower, and that their resonant-frequency analyses of Font Moss have not been extended to the ninth landing. A minority view, advanced in Scriptorium marginalia and never published, holds that a phrase drawn from the Font and immediately forgotten becomes a definition that was never written, and that the two Fonts are therefore the same Font observed from opposite ends. This view is not cited in any Concordance.

The winter of the refloored landing

The ninth landing was refloored in the winter following the survey of Holding 9-k-4, an operation that required the Font to be covered for eleven days with oiled cloth weighted at the corners. On the twelfth day the covering was removed and the surface was found to be holding a quotation that no one could raise: a phrase that surfaced above the water of its own accord, repeatedly, for the better part of a month, and which every visitor heard in a different voice. The Scriptorium recorded nine distinct transcriptions of it and the Librarians suppressed eight, on the procedural ground that a quotation without an attribution cannot be entered in the index.

The ninth transcription was entered, and then struck through, and then entered again in the margin, where it remains. It reads: "the cloth was weighted at the corners, not at the sides, and this is the whole of the matter." Custodial practice at the landing has weighted the cloth at the sides ever since.

Restrictions

The Font may be visited on any day the ninth landing is open. Visitors are asked not to dry their hands on the landing's hangings, not to speak the drawn phrase aloud in the hearing of a second person, and not to return to the Font in the same day with a question prepared in advance, as prepared questions draw nothing and leave the surface stilled for the remainder of the afternoon. The Vault of Lost Causes has petitioned three times for a reading of the Font on the ground that a lost cause is often only a lost quotation with a better advocate, and has been refused each time without reasons given. The Memorabilia of Lost Causes holds the three refusals, framed.