The Manuscript That Ate My Evening

It started because I was bored and a little restless and someone on a forum mentioned the Voynich Manuscript in passing like it was nothing. Like it was a normal thing to drop into conversation. For anyone who hasn't heard of it, and honestly, three hours ago I hadn't either, it's this medieval book from the 1400s, written in a script no one has ever decoded, illustrated with plants that don't seem to exist, and full of diagrams that look like someone was trying to document a world that isn't this one. Scholars have been trying to crack it for over a hundred years. No one has. I read about it until my eyes went dry.

The thing about Wikipedia at eleven at night is that it doesn't let you leave. I went from the Voynich Manuscript to unsolved historical mysteries to medieval alchemy to, somehow, sourdough bread starter, because one of the alchemy pages mentioned fermentation and my brain just quietly unhitched itself and followed the thread. I have three pages of notes that make absolutely no sense in sequence. My calves are still sore from Tuesday's run and I am sitting cross-legged on my bed like that's helping anything.

deep in the rabbit hole

I think what gets me about the Voynich thing specifically is that it just exists. Five hundred and something pages of something, sitting in a library at Yale, completely legible as an object and completely illegible as a text. People have carbon-dated it, analyzed the ink, run early computer analysis on the letter frequencies, and it's still just: unknown. There's something almost comforting about that. Not every mystery is a crisis. Some things are just quietly, stubbornly unresolved. I feel like I needed to hear that this week, even from a six-hundred-year-old book I found by accident.

evidence of a problem

Anyway. It's past midnight now. Mother's Day is Sunday and I haven't figured out what I'm doing about that yet, which is a separate spiral I'm choosing not to start tonight. The notes are going in my nightstand. The bread starter research can wait. I'm going to close the laptop and lie here thinking about unsolvable things until I fall asleep, which, knowing me, will take a while.