Room 02 · Behind the glass

How this room wears

The same fourteen sentences as the first room, laid out under a drawn sky that keeps Kyoto's hour and weather. What you see first depends on the screen in your hand, and so does what you wear.

Each sentence is a separate surface. It is worn by a pointer passing over it, by a finger touching it, by being selected, by resting in the middle of the screen while someone reads, and a little by simply being on screen at all. Nothing below where a reader stops scrolling is ever worn, so the shape of the wear is also a map of how far people get, and that shape differs between a phone, which shows a few sentences at a time, and a wide screen, which shows many.

Being on screen only counts while someone is evidently there: a scroll, a movement of the pointer, a key, a touch within the last fifteen seconds. A tab left open in another room earns nothing.

Wear accumulates as weight. Weight becomes softness along the curve 1 − e−w/r, where r is 400 for the shared page and 20 for a personal one. The first touches show quickly; the last never quite finish.

The same history can be shown two ways. Erosion takes weight and presence away, like a step. Patina adds ink and warmth, like leather. Switch between them on the page. The wear is the same; only the reading of it changes.

Shared wear in this room is kept for good. It has never been reset. This room may become unreadable, and this page keeps a legible copy so that the loss is a choice rather than an accident.

One visitor may add only so much per day, so no one can wear the page out for everyone else. Crawlers and other machines are counted separately and do not wear the shared page. Their weight so far: 0.

Wearing since
13 October 2026, 20:19 in Kyoto, 2 weeks ago
Total weight
415
Reading now
0
Most worn
Rikyu swept the garden until it was clean, then shook a branch so that a few leaves fell.
Least worn
The tea bowl that is loved is the one with the chip, because the chip is where a life touched it.

As it was, week by week

A picture of the shared wear is kept each Monday after dawn. Nothing is wiped by it.

  1. 26 Oct 2026 weight 411
  2. 19 Oct 2026 weight 217

The text, unworn

For each sentence: total weight, of which merely seen, then how far down the page people get (its exposure as a share of the first sentence's), then the weight that came from narrow, medium and wide screens.

  1. You are reading this, and the reading is wearing it.

    5 · seen 4 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 0 · wide 4

  2. Every eye that passes over these words softens them a little, the way a thousand hands soften the rail of a stair.

    22 · seen 10 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 0 · wide 21

  3. Nothing here is being destroyed. It is being used.

    20 · seen 9 · reach 100% · narrow 3 · medium 0 · wide 17

  4. What do you give your attention to, and what does your attention do to it?

    6 · seen 4 · reach 100% · narrow 3 · medium 0 · wide 3

  5. The tea bowl that is loved is the one with the chip, because the chip is where a life touched it.

    4 · seen 4 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 0 · wide 3

  6. Rikyu swept the garden until it was clean, then shook a branch so that a few leaves fell.

    51 · seen 10 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 0 · wide 50

  7. Which lines of your own day are worn smooth, and which are still crisp from never being read?

    47 · seen 9 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 0 · wide 46

  8. Impermanence is not the sadness that things end. It is the condition that lets them be touched at all.

    22 · seen 4 · reach 100% · narrow 3 · medium 0 · wide 19

  9. The I Ching does not ask what will happen. It asks what is happening, and where you are standing in it.

    6 · seen 4 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 0 · wide 5

  10. If this page becomes unreadable, it will be because it was read.

    19 · seen 10 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 0 · wide 18

  11. Somewhere, someone is resting a finger on this sentence right now, or no one is.

    18 · seen 9 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 0 · wide 17

  12. Is attention a kind of wear, or a kind of care?

    12 · seen 1 · reach 25% · narrow 3 · medium 0 · wide 9

  13. Come back in a year and see what the world has read, and what it has let alone.

    6 · seen 4 · reach 100% · narrow 3 · medium 0 · wide 3

  14. What would you keep crisp, if you could, and what would you be glad to see softened?

    4 · seen 4 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 0 · wide 3

  15. the sun, or the moon

    10 · seen 8 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 10

  16. the far mountain

    49 · seen 8 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 49

  17. the near hills

    50 · seen 7 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 50

  18. the tree

    38 · seen 8 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 38

  19. the ground

    26 · seen 9 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 26