Precept of Non-Anticipation

The Precept of Non-Anticipation is the standing instruction of the Librarians governing the treatment of phenomena that have not yet been awaited. First entered in the registry of the Vault of Perpetual Anticipation in the winter of the 2,944th cycle, the Precept holds that a thing may be catalogued before it is expected, but must not be catalogued because it is expected. Its short form, hung on a card at the head of the seventh landing of the Coil of Anticipation, reads: "Let the record precede the expectation, and not proceed from it."

Text and adoption

The Precept was adopted by the Librarians in a closed sitting whose minutes survive only as a table of attending offices and a single struck-through line. The operative text, as recensioned under the Third Concordance and reproduced in the Standing Register, runs:

"No article shall be entered on the strength of its being awaited. Where anticipation is unavoidable in the observer, it shall be quarantined from the description by the interval of one full description."

— Third Concordance, Annex 9, clause 4

The interval here is not a period of time but a rule of procedure: the first description of any awaited thing is sealed unread, and a second description is made without reference to the first. Where the two agree, the article stands. Where they do not, both are held in the Vault of Perpetual Anticipation and the article is left unwritten until a third clerk, ignorant of both, produces a fourth. The Grammar of Anticipation supplies the naming conventions for these paired entries; the Spiral Grammar supplies their spiral positions.

The Fallow Landing dispute

Between the 3,101st and 3,140th cycles the Precept was the subject of a dispute between the Office of Sealed Descriptions and the clerks of the outer wall, which was settled in favour of neither. The origin was an entry made in the 3,101st cycle by Clerk Anselm Dree, then of the ninth gallery, concerning a cloud-form which the Coil had claimed under its purview and which Dree had described before it was anticipated by anyone, from a hatch in the outer wall of the Coil.

Dree's description was accurate. The cloud-form arrived eleven days later and matched the entry in every respect. On that ground the Office of Sealed Descriptions argued that the Precept's purpose — the exclusion of anticipation from the record — had been satisfied, since there had been no expectation at the time of writing. The outer-wall clerks replied that accuracy was beside the point, that a description made from an Aperture of Anticipation is a description made in the posture of awaiting, and that the entry was therefore void regardless of its correctness. The landing where the entry had been affixed was ordered fallow, and remains so; the hatch is sealed, and by the ruling of the Twelfth Maxim no clerk may stand at it for longer than the time required to note the seal's condition.

The clarified position

Clarification 17-C, issued in the 3,147th cycle, resolved the question in a manner later taken up by the Precept of Attentional Recession, which borrows its reasoning nearly whole. The clarification held that attention recedes from its object in proportion to the object's delay, and that an entry made in the posture of awaiting is not redeemed by its accuracy, because the accuracy belongs to the delay and not to the clerk. It further held, somewhat to the surprise of the outer wall, that the subject of an anticipation may be catalogued freely once it has passed, provided the article makes no mention of having been awaited. The prohibition is on the record of expectation, not on the thing expected.

Dree's cloud-form accordingly has an article. It is filed under its own shape, is four lines long, and does not say what it was.

Interaction with neighbouring precepts

The Precept of Non-Anticipation sits at an awkward angle to the Precept of Unwritten Catalogues, which holds that a book referenced is a book extant. A reference is, in the ordinary course, a kind of anticipation — the citing clerk expects the book to be there before it is fetched. The Librarians of the Unwritten have never reconciled the two. The working compromise, recorded in a marginal note of the 3,183rd cycle and never promoted to a Clarification, is that the Precept of Unwritten Catalogues governs what may be asserted and the Precept of Non-Anticipation governs what may be described, and that a clerk who finds these to conflict should finish the sentence before raising it.

The Precept of Withheld Agency is nearer in spirit and is often cited alongside, though the two are not related by descent. Where the Withheld Agency removes the agent from the record, the Non-Anticipation removes the waiting, and an article that has been emptied of both is considered finished.

Practice and observance

Observance is by the quire and not by the day. Each quire of twelve clerks maintains one sealed description in rotation, and the seal is broken only by an officer of the Vault of Perpetual Anticipation on the third landing, in the presence of two witnesses who have not read the entry. It is considered poor form for either witness to have been present at the sealing. No clerk is required to anticipate anything in order to comply, which is the point of the Precept and the reason it has never been popular.

The Principle of Anticipatory Concession and Clause 3 are the usual authorities cited against the Precept by clerks who wish to enter an article early, and the Clause of Unwritten Authority is the usual authority cited against them. The dispute is old, is not expected to conclude, and no record of that expectation may be made.

Visitors are reminded that the fallow landing is not a thoroughfare.