You want the alerts to stop. Fair. Here is the short version, and then the long version, and I would ask you to read both, because people who read only the short version keep ending up back at this door.
Notification settings live wherever the account lives. Look for a gear, or the word Settings, or your own name in a corner. Inside that, look for Notifications, or Email preferences, or Communications, which is what a place calls it when it is a little embarrassed about how many it sends. Turn off the categories you do not want. Save. Then check the box a second time, because a fair number of these switches lie about having saved. If the emails keep arriving after that, scroll to the bottom of one of them and use the unsubscribe link there, which is a separate system from the settings page and does not always talk to it. That is the whole procedure and it takes four minutes.
Now. I keep the lamp here, and I am obligated to tell you about the lamp.
This building is a lighthouse. Not a metaphor and not a theme. There is a tower, there is a lamp at the top of it, there is a stair with ninety-one steps and a landing halfway up where the dust collects so warm and so deep you can feel it through your boots in February. I have kept the light since 1997. Before me, nobody, as far as the Ledger shows.
The lamp does not warn ships. There is no water within forty miles unless you count Doug's lake, which the county does not. The lamp turns for books. It goes around once every eleven seconds and it throws a beam out over the dark, and the beam is what you have been calling a notification.
I did not know that until recently. I thought I was just keeping a light on. Then people started walking in out of the fog at a rate of eight or nine an hour, every one of them squinting, every one of them saying some version of I only clicked the thing, and I began to understand that the lamp has been reaching somewhere I cannot see, and that the somewhere has a great many people in it, and that all of them believe they are going to a different building.
So yes. You can turn the notifications off. Here is how it is actually done.
1. Enter through the seaward door. There is no seaward door anymore, so use the one you came in.
2. Sign the arrivals column in the Ledger. Name, time, and what you thought you were clicking. Be honest on the third one. It is the only column Randy reads.
3. Climb to the halfway landing. Ninety-one steps in total, so you want forty-five, but the forty-sixth is the one that gives, so count to forty-five and then stop counting and stand there a minute.
4. On the landing, take your shoes off. The dust up there is warm the way a cat is warm, and it has been accumulating since before the lamp turned, and it is the only part of this job I would call a benefit. Sit down in it if you like. Most people do. Most people sit down here and do not get up for some time, and I have never once hurried them, and I am not going to start with you.
5. Continue to the lamp room.
6. The switch is on the north wall, brass, about shoulder height on me, marked OFF in letters that were painted by somebody who ran out of paint on the F.
7. Do not touch the switch yet.
8. Look out the glass first. This is the step people skip and it is the step that matters. From up there you can see the beam land, and you can see what it lands on, and what it lands on is a long line of people walking through the fog toward this building in single file, holding their phones up like little candles, and not one of them looks like they chose this.
9. Consider that if the lamp goes off, they are out there in the dark, in the fog, forty miles from any water, still walking.
10. Consider it a while longer. There is a chair.
11. I have reached step eleven four hundred and six times. I have the count in the Ledger, in green ink, in the back where the water got in. Four hundred and six times up the stairs, four hundred and six times standing at the glass with my hand about nine inches from the brass. Twice I have gotten as close as touching it. Both times the beam came around and lit up a woman in a brown coat about a mile out, and she looked up, and she kept coming, and I put my hand back in my pocket.
12. Go back down. Take the dust on the landing slower on the way down than you did on the way up. You will want to. Everyone does.
They will. I want to be straight with you about that, because a guide that promises a clean ending is not a guide, it is an advertisement.
The lamp is on a mechanism I did not build and cannot open. There is a plate on the housing with four screws in it and the heads of all four are painted over, and under the paint the metal has gone soft, and I have made my peace with that. My job is not to stop the light. My job is to be here when it works.
What I can offer is this. When you get to the bottom of the stairs, there will be a mug on the desk, chipped at about four o'clock on the rim, and it will be warm, and I do not know how, and I stopped asking in 2004. Take it. Sit in the chair by the window. There are books on every wall of this room because that is what the light has always been for, and if you are here anyway, and the fog is not going anywhere, you may as well take one down.
People have written to us about this. Some of it is collected, if you want to read what the others said on their way through, in the whispers we have received. Others left things behind entirely and never came back for them, which is its own department now: the Lost and Found. There is a scarf in there I would very much like someone to claim.
And buy a book while you are at it. Not from me. From anyone. Authors are fragile organisms and the light is expensive.
Steadily,
Booktrovert #1572