The Continuity School

Overview

The Continuity School is the collective designation for the loose affiliation of readers, registrars, and stairwell scholars who hold that no administrative boundary in the Tower may be treated as a genuine interruption of anything. The School is not a body in the sense that the Librarians recognise bodies; it has no seal, no roll, and no chamber, and its adherents are recorded, where they are recorded at all, as a footnote in the returns of the Department of Vital Statistics. It is nonetheless cited in eleven Concordances and disputed in four.

The School should not be confused with the School of Vital Continuity, which descends from it and which has spent a considerable portion of its history insisting that it does not. The distinction is real but is observed chiefly by the Vital Continuity School itself.

Origins and the Fifteenth Concordance

The Continuity School coalesced around the reading of the Fifteenth Concordance, whose Annex 2 provided that "a thing shall not be deemed to have ceased while any part of it remains in the keeping of the Tower." The clause was drafted to settle a dispute over grain, but it was taken up by the Preservers, among whom a faction began applying it to stairwells, ledgers, and eventually persons. The Hum of Continuity Document is generally treated as the School's first extended statement, though its author never used the name and the School of Vital Continuity claims the text for itself.

By CY 874 the School's position had been summarised by the clerk Wren Almest in a note that survives only in quotation: "Continuity is not maintained. It is what remains when maintenance is declined." Dissenting Opinion on Continuity, CY 876, which reproduces the sentence at some length before rejecting it.

Principal tenets

The School advances three propositions, none of which has ever been formally adopted and all of which are treated as settled by those who advance them. The first is that the numbering of floors constitutes an inventory of positions rather than a sequence, and that a reader who climbs from 41 to 88 has not travelled but has consulted. The second is that the Principle of Unbroken Continuity applies to documents as readily as to persons, so that an amended Concordance is the same document as its predecessor and cannot be cited against it. The third is that no entry in the Vital Register may be closed except by an act of the whole Tower, which has not occurred.

The Pragmatic School rejects all three on operational grounds, and the two schools have been in documented disagreement since the publication of the Third Concordance, whose Clause 19 repudiated the Pragmatic position outright and thereby, to the School's considerable irritation, provided the groundwork for Certified Continuity. The School regards Certified Continuity as a paraphrase of its own doctrine, executed badly and charged for.

The Winter on the Ninety-Third

The School's reputation rests largely on an incident in the winter of CY 881, when a stairwell serving floors 93 through 97 was found impassable following a collapse of the eastern landing. The Manual of Vertical Cohesion required the landing to be struck from the register, which would have severed the numbered sequence and obliged the two parties waiting on floor 95 to be reclassified as new arrivals. The School objected, arguing that the stairwell had not ceased to exist but had merely become unclimbable, and that the distinction was preserved in the Fifteenth Concordance and ought to govern.

The objection was upheld by the office then administering Maintenance, which recorded that the landing was "extant and inconvenient" and directed that it be retained in the register with a short annotation. The annotation reads, in full: "Do not use." The two parties were released in the spring.

"A stairwell that cannot be climbed is a stairwell that is presently not being climbed, which is a condition of use and not of being. To strike it is to confuse the map with the building, a fault we have had occasion to remark in others."

— Office of Maintenance, return for floor 95, CY 881

Criticism and the Concordance difficulty

The School's most persistent difficulty is procedural. Because it holds that an amended document remains identical to its unamended form, its advocates have on three occasions cited a Concordance clause in its superseded wording and have been unable to explain, when challenged, why the correction did not also apply to their citation. The Ontological School has made this the centrepiece of its objection, observing that the Continuity School "preserves everything except the means of correcting it."

The School's answer, offered in a marginal note of CY 883 and never developed, is that a correction is not an interruption but a continuation by other means. The Librarians have not ruled on the point. They are not expected to.

Relation to other holdings

The School maintains no formal position on Environmental Monitoring, though its adherents have historically taken a dim view of instruments, on the grounds that a reading is a momentary interruption of the thing read. Its relationship with the Perpetual Calibrated Chain is correspondingly cool. Where the School has been most influential is in the drafting of Temporary Permanencies, a category it did not invent but has done more than any other body to keep open.