Unitarian School

The Unitarian School is a body of archival doctrine holding that every floor of the Tower is, at bottom, the same floor, and that the apparent differences between them are artefacts of numbering, lighting, and the order in which a reader happens to arrive. It is among the oldest continuously seated schools in the archive, though its membership has never exceeded forty-one and has on three occasions fallen to a single Librarian. Its position is summarised in the school's standing formula, recited at the opening of each of its sessions: "One shelf, variously shelved."

The School is frequently confused with the School of Particulars, which holds almost precisely the reverse, and the two have maintained a formal correspondence since Year 190 consisting entirely of letters correcting one another's minutes.

Origins and the First Recension

The Unitarian School enters the record in Year 74, in a marginal note appended to a floor inventory by the clerk Halven Roos, who observed that the sixth and nineteenth catalogues of the Western Stack listed identical holdings under different headings and concluded that the headings, not the holdings, were the error. Roos's note was copied, recopied, and by Year 91 had acquired a seal. The Concordance of Uniform Holdings, issued that year, gave the School its first written footing; its preamble states that "the multiplicity of floors is a convenience of transport and not a distinction of substance" (Concordance of Uniform Holdings, preamble).

The School's early history is largely a history of being asked to leave rooms. It was expelled from the Convocation of Shelfwardens in Year 103 for refusing to recognise a difference between the north and south reading rooms, and readmitted in Year 111 after the Convocation discovered that its own boundary markers had been misplaced by four spans.

Doctrine

The School distinguishes between what it calls shelving and what it calls holding. Shelving is the arrangement of a thing; holding is the thing itself. Unitarians maintain that the Tower possesses one holding, variously shelved, and that a reader who climbs from Floor 12 to Floor 988 has not travelled between subjects but has walked around a single subject at increasing distance. The doctrine is set out at length in Miren Casta's Recension, the School's standard internal text, which runs to four volumes and is bound identically in all of them, a decision the School regards as self-evident and its critics regard as a joke that has gone on too long.

The School permits one exception, recorded in the Annex of Distinctions: things that are demonstrably elsewhere. No agreed test for demonstrable elsewhereness has ever been adopted. The Ontological School has twice offered to supply one and been declined.

"We do not deny the stairs. We deny that the stairs go anywhere."

— Miren Casta's Recension, Vol. II, opening chapter

The Question of the Numbering

The School's most contested claim concerns floor numbers. Since the numbers are not sequential in any way anyone has reconstructed, Unitarians argue that they cannot be distinguishing anything, and that a numbering system which fails to order its objects has quietly admitted there is only one object. The Progressive Cartography School has answered that a map which cannot be followed is still a map, and that the Unitarians have mistaken the failure of the numbering for the failure of the floors.

The dispute sharpened in Year 218, when the Proceduralist School seceded from the Literalist School over an unrelated matter of clause precedence, and the Unitarians — who had been asked to mediate — submitted a single-page finding that both parties were describing the same secession from different landings. The finding is preserved in the Register of Unhelpful Instruments and is the only entry in that register to have been entered twice.

Relations with Other Schools

The School's nearest doctrinal relative is the Foundationalist School, with which it shares a conviction that the archive rests on something single, though the Foundationalists locate that something at the bottom and the Unitarians decline to locate it at all. Relations with the Sceptical School are cordial and entirely unproductive; the Sceptics regard the Unitarians as fellow travellers who have not finished the argument, and the Unitarians regard the Sceptics as Unitarians who have stopped too early.

The School has never joined the Ontological School nor its rival the Ontological Anchor School, on the grounds that both bodies are quarrelling over the number of things when the number has not been established. It maintains a standing exchange with the Recursive School, whose members the Unitarians describe as "our own position, repeated" (Miren Casta's Recension, Vol. IV, appendix). The Functionalist School opposed the School's seating in Year 61 and has not spoken to it since, a silence the Unitarians have chosen to interpret as agreement.

Membership and Practice

The School meets on the second landing of whichever floor its presiding Librarian was standing on at the hour of convocation. Attendance is recorded not by name but by tally, on the reasoning that a list of names would imply more than one attendee. The tally has been challenged four times before the Librarians and upheld three times; the fourth challenge was withdrawn when the complainant was shown the tally.

Members are required to surrender their floor marks on admission and to recover them on departure, a practice instituted after the winter of Year 402, when a delegation of eleven returned to the wrong floor and catalogued it for six days before anyone noticed. The School's own account of the incident holds that no error occurred. Visitors are asked to leave their coats on the landing and to take the same coat away with them.

Criticism

The principal objection to the School is that its doctrine cannot be distinguished from a description of the Tower as it actually is, and that a position which costs nothing to hold is not a position. The Revisionist School has put this most bluntly, observing that the Unitarians have never been able to specify what they would give up if they were wrong. The School's answer, given by Oris Fenn before the Convocation of Shelfwardens in Year 388, is that it would give up the second landing.

No second landing has been surrendered. The School continues to seat forty-one, or fewer, and to hold that the Tower is one floor, extensively furnished.