The Principle of Ephemeral Foundation

The Principle of Ephemeral Foundation is a doctrine of Tower law holding that a structure may serve as a foundation for holdings, obligations, and shelving arrangements for precisely as long as the structure itself is recognized to exist, and not one instant longer. It is distinguished from the Axiomatic Foundation, which claims precedence by self-evidence, and from the Principle of Ephemeral Binding, which governs the enforceability of holdings that endure only for the duration of their own binding. The Ephemeral Foundation governs something narrower and, its critics say, more precarious: the ground itself.

The Principle was first articulated in the annexes to The Tower Foundation Edict of 3 Felting, Year 411, though the Office of Ephemeral Affairs maintains that its substance was already operative in practice for at least two centuries before that date and merely awaited a scribe with sufficient nerve to write it down.

Doctrinal content

In its received form, the Principle provides that where a floor, stair, landing, or load-bearing wall is catalogued as ephemeral, any holding shelved upon it inherits the ephemeral status of its support, regardless of whether the holding itself was ever catalogued as ephemeral. The doctrine is transitive. A book on a shelf on a landing on a floor is ephemeral if the floor is; the shelf and the landing need not be mentioned in the same record, provided all three records cite the same support.

The practical consequence, set out in Point 12 of the Register of Ephemeral Statutes, is that a holding may be perfectly stable, repeatedly observed, and physically unremarkable, and still be indexed as ephemeral because a clerk in another department recorded its floor as uncertain in Year 389 and no one has since been found to revise the entry. The Principle of Ephemeral Authority is commonly cited alongside it for this reason; the two are frequently confused, and the Office of Ephemeral Audits has issued no fewer than four notices declining to clarify the distinction on the grounds that clarification would require a ruling.

Sennel's objection and the Turn

The Principle's most celebrated difficulty is the objection raised by the auditor Sennel of the Ninth Spiral in Year 437, who observed that if a foundation is ephemeral for the duration of its recognition, then the act of recognition is itself doing the foundational work, and the foundation is therefore not the structure but the recognition of it. Sennel concluded that the Principle, taken strictly, abolished foundations altogether and left only clerks standing in a circle, holding one another up.

"If the ground endures only while it is seen to endure, then it is not the ground that bears the weight. It is the seeing. I decline to certify a floor on this reasoning, and I note that the floor has not asked me to."

— Sennel of the Ninth Spiral, Dissent appended to Audit Roll 437/12

The objection was referred to the School of Ephemeral Cataloguing, whose principle of persistent absence had furnished much of the Procedure's philosophical vocabulary. The School's response, adopted into the Principle of Ephemeral Authority and thereafter cited in every subsequent dispute, was that Sennel had mistaken the object of the doctrine: the Principle does not claim that recognition bears weight, only that recognition determines which record bears the weight. Whether anything bears weight in the physical sense was remitted to the Cartography of Ephemeral Stacks and has not been conclusively settled.

Application in the middle stacks

The Principle is applied across the middle stacks of the Tower, where floor numbering is least stable and several landings are catalogued under two numbers simultaneously. The Clerk for Unobserved Spaces assigns provisional shelfmarks under the Principle of Ephemeral Holdings whenever a phenomenon ceases observation mid-cataloguing, and those shelfmarks are anchored, under the Ephemeral Foundation, to whatever support was last reliably recorded. Where no support was ever reliably recorded, the shelfmark is anchored to the shelfmark above it, and the chain is permitted to ascend until it reaches a floor with a name.

A complication arose in the winter of Year 462 on Floor 88, when a landing catalogued under both 88 and 91 was found to be serving as foundation for holdings on each floor while being listed as ephemeral under the other. Two clerks, working the night rotation, independently re-anchored the affected shelfmarks in opposite directions, producing a loop that the Audits Office described in its report as "structurally sound and doctrinally intolerable." The loop was resolved by sealing the landing and issuing a Concordance amendment; the shelving on Floor 88 remains where it was placed and is not to be reshelved until the amendment is read.

Dispute between the Concordances

Scholarly opinion divides on whether the Principle derives its force from the Axiomatic Foundation or from the Clause of Necessary Foundation. The former position, favoured in the upper reading rooms, treats the Principle as self-evident and therefore beyond appeal; the latter, favoured in the lower, treats it as necessary only because no alternative foundation has been proposed. The two positions appear irreconcilable and are in fact reconciled in practice by never being argued in the same room.

Foundation of Literal Intent is sometimes cited against both, on the reasoning that a foundation described as ephemeral cannot have been intended as a foundation. The Ur-Charter of Silent Foundation is silent on the matter, a silence its commentators have interpreted in eleven incompatible ways.

Register of holdings

The following instruments are held to depend upon the Principle. The list is maintained by the Office of Ephemeral Audits and is understood to be incomplete.

• The Annex to Tower Foundation Edict, unsealed and re-copied annually
• The Sennel Dissent, retained notwithstanding its adoption into contrary doctrine
• The Floor 88 re-anchoring schedule, sealed
• The provisional shelfmarks of the middle stacks, classed under the Clause of Necessary Foundation pending audit

Consultation of the Annex requires a Librarian's countermark. The countermark is not issued on the ninth day of any month.