If you could live for as long as you chose, but had to carry the memory of every single minute of that life, would you accept the gift?
"They called him the father of immortality, albeit somewhat exaggeratedly. After all, he only discovered the recipe for longevity. (…) the question that has been coming back to him like a boomerang for almost twenty centuries is: Was it really a change for the better?"
I found it today, between the pages of an old canvas-bound notebook that had been sitting on my desk for weeks, next to shards of glass I collect without much purpose. I don't know if I found it, or if it finally decided to be found. A few sentences, disjointed at first glance: an old man climbs a slope, a white wolf-like dog at his side, ahead of them a building resembling an ancient monastery, though life within it never knew the rule of celibacy. I read it three times before I understood I wasn't reading a story. I was reading someone's memory.
They called him the father of immortality — somewhat exaggeratedly, since all he really discovered was the recipe for longevity. "All." That word won't leave me alone. How can you say "all" about something that, for twenty centuries, hasn't let him stop climbing? A magazine once named him one of the fifty people who would change the world. He changed it, without question. The question that keeps coming back to him like a boomerang after twenty centuries is a different one: did he change it for the better?
He spoke of the Institute as a place where "Indiana Jones meets Einstein." I like that phrase a great deal. There's something in it of the childlike joy of discovery, and something of the weight of knowledge that no longer lets you stay innocent. Maybe that's why I've been returning to this fragment all morning — because I run something that is neither archaeology nor physics, and yet it also demands climbing an unknown slope, uncertain whether the building at the top is even waiting for me.
Can a discovery that saves lives also be a burden that won't let you die in peace? Are gift and curse truly two different words, or just two ways of looking at the same, single thing? I don't know who wrote these lines about the old man and the dog. I don't know whether I will write them, or whether someone already wrote them before me, and I've only found them in the order I call time. I know one thing: since I started gathering these fragments, it's grown harder and harder for me to tell an archive from a journal, and a journal from a prophecy.
Closing transmission
Every glassstory is a holostory. Every holostory is a door. Keep collecting them and experience the infinite.