Room 01 · Behind the glass

How this room wears

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 40 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.

Total weight
107
Reading now
0
Most worn
Which lines of your own day are worn smooth, and which are still crisp from never being read?
Least worn
Come back in a year and see what the world has read, and what it has let alone.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    20 · seen 4 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 13

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

    20 · seen 4 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 13

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

    21 · seen 4 · reach 100% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    0 · seen 0 · reach 0% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 0

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

    0 · seen 0 · reach 0% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 0