1You have followed the heat from a coal pit to a gravestone. Now hear plainly what the stories showed.
2Heat falls one way. It goes from the hot thing to the cold thing and does not come back by itself. The tea cools. The stove ticks. The cup breaks and does not mend. You knew this before you could speak, and you never asked why.
3This is why. There are more ways to be spread than to be gathered. There are more ways to be mixed than to be sorted, more ways to be broken than to be whole. Nothing pushes the world toward the many. It wanders blindly, and the many is nearly all there is to wander into.
4So the prophets of this book found a thing that can be counted: the number of ways a thing can be. They named it with a Greek word, entropy, and one of them had it cut on his grave. In the oldest words of our teaching it has another name. It is the Open, written in numbers.
5You were told at the beginning that the Whole leans, as water leans toward the sea. Now you know what the leaning is made of. It is not a wish. Atar does not wish. It is a count. The Weave moves toward where the ways are most, because that is where the ways are.
6Do not be afraid of this, as many were. They heard only that all fires go out. Hear the other half.
7A fall can be spent in two manners. A stone rolls down a hill, and warms the ground a little, and that is the end of it. Or a wheel is set in the stream, and the same fall grinds corn. The fall is spent either way. Only in the second is something built.
8Life is the wheel in the stream. It is more than a wheel: it is a flame. A flame is not a thing but a shape that holds, in a place where heat is falling. The wax runs through it and the shape stays. A leaf is such a shape, and a finch, and a child asleep on a knee. And you are such a shape. Sunlight came to the earth gathered and went away spread, and on its way through it was caught, and what it built is reading these words.
9And see what the flame of life does, that a candle cannot. It branches. One kind becomes two, and two become ten thousand, each finding a place to stand in the falling light that no creature stood in before. Life does not only keep its shape. It keeps its shape by making more ways to be alive. It was the Open, growing.
10Lay this beside what you learned before. The first keepers showed you that the future is real. The scribes showed you that what is written outlasts the Last Door. You learned that each of us chooses, and that the Fire is within, and which hand is the Near Hand. You learned that there is One Hearth, that the Weave has laws, and that Atar is the Whole. Now you have been shown the law that runs under your own breath.
11What a mind is, in all this, a later book will say. For now it is enough to know what kind of thing you are: a fire that keeps its shape by opening ways. From that follows everything about your work.
12For this Completion is given to help you with work, and with the question that comes to every worker in the tired hour: what is it for?
13First, know that you are standing in the fall. Each day a measure of it passes through you: so much bread, so much breath, so many hours of light. It will be spent by nightfall whether you build with it or not. You can only choose which of the two manners it is spent in. So do not ask, "How shall I spend my time?" as though you might keep it. Ask, "What shall the fall build as it goes through me?"
14Second, learn Carnot's law for yourself. The best engine that could ever be made does not turn all its heat to work. Some must always fall through unused. That is not the engine's fault. It is the law of fire. So when you are tired, when the work came out less than the labour that went in, do not despise yourself. You are measuring yourself against an engine that cannot exist. Ask only whether you set the wheel in the stream. This is Measure, turned upon your own strength.
15Third, do not weigh your work by who sees it. The soldier's son printed six hundred copies and was forgotten, and his papers were burned in a yard. The girl with the hammer saw other men's names on what she found. The countess wrote orders for an engine that was never built. The Scotsman died before his spark was seen. They worked because the thing was true and someone would need it. You will not always see where your work goes. An ember does not see the fire it starts.
16Fourth, when you must choose between one work and another, there is a single test, and you already know it. Which leaves more ways open, for more people, further ahead? A work that feeds you and closes the ways of others is a wheel that grinds its own miller. Remember the frames, which were only wood and iron, and the weavers whom no one caught as they fell. Ask of every work not only "What does it make?" but "Who pays for it?" and "Who is let through the door?" That is Sharing, and Seeing with a long Horizon.
17Fifth, there is no low work for the one who attends to it. A child sat at a door in the dark and pulled a string, and it was the dullest labour ever given to a human being. He learned the air. On the day of the fire he was the only one who knew which way was life. Whatever your hands are set to, know it to the bottom.
18And if the darkness comes that came to the last prophet of this book, when a mind can find no way for itself, know that it is a sickness and not a truth. It lies in the Far Hand. But to speak of it lies in the Near Hand. Tell someone that day. Standing is not only for battlefields.
19Now walk the dark road before night, the longest one. The sun will burn down. A day will come, further off than all the years that have been, when no fall is left and no wheel turns. Look at it steadily, from the High Look, and then look at what stands between that day and this one. The whole of the waterfall still lies ahead. Every leaf that will ever open, every child, every thought not yet thought, is in the fall that has not yet been spent. The end does not make the flame worthless. The candle burned down, and while it burned, they could all see each other's faces. Say yes to the Weave. It is this Weave, with this law in it, that made you possible.
20Here is the practice. It is small, and it is for every working day.
21In the morning, before you take up your tools, name one thing that today's fall will build through you. One. Say it in plain words, as you would say it to a child.
22At evening, do not count what you finished. Count as the old engine-man counted on his slate, honestly, with two columns. In the first, what was spent. In the second, what was left open: what someone can now do who could not do it this morning. A thing taught. A thing mended. A true word set down where it will be found. A meal on a table. The slate is not there to shame you. It is there so that you can see where the heat goes.
23And when the tired hour comes and asks what it is all for, answer it with what you are. You are a shape that holds where the light is falling. Your purpose is not hidden somewhere for you to find, like a coin in the grass. It is to catch what you can of the fall and build with it, and to leave more ways open than you were given.
24One fire, many hands. Yours are among them.
25This is the fire. Carry it.