Reorganise into two books plus shared theory and essays

theory/                 EVIDENCE.md + THEORY.md, shared by everything
  a-days-walk/            Book One: CHAPTERS, CRAFT, FIELD_BRIEF, OUTLINE, drafts/
  seasonal-intelligence/  Book Two: OUTLINE
  essays/                 the six pieces
  archive/                superseded originals, unmaintained by design
  PORTFOLIO.md            the split and the sequence

Adds a README to each directory. Cross-references updated to the new
layout; archive/ references left broken deliberately, as those are
historical documents.

Also revises chapter 6 of Book One: the notification scene is now four
items rather than four hundred, since the narrator is a light user. The
low volume is stronger evidence than a flood would have been - it is the
case the attention-economy account cannot explain. Tracked as A26 in the
argument ledger, planted in the prologue and chapter 1.

a-days-walk/drafts/03-within-a-days-walk.md

@@ -0,0 +1,138 @@
+# Chapter 3 — Within a Day's Walk
+
+*Stage 3 · Kaproun → Nová Bystřice · 15 km*
+*Draft 2 · rebuilt on a pond basin · ~3,400 words of body text · target 5,500*
+
+---
+
+On the third morning I came up out of the trees somewhere above Kaproun and found a whole pond laid out below me, and I stopped, and I did not go on for a long time.
+
+It was not large. Perhaps eight hundred metres from the dam to the far end, narrowing into reeds where the stream came in, and it lay in a shallow basin with forest on three sides and the dam closing the fourth. I was on the eastern rim, thirty or forty metres above the water, on a track that ran round without losing height. The light was coming over my right shoulder and had got down onto the water but not yet onto the western shore, so the pond was in two halves — one of them white and unbearable to look at directly, the other still holding the trees upside down, black and exact.
+
+There were four buildings. Two together at the dam end, one of them long and low with a rusted iron roof, which I took to be something to do with the fish. One house further up on the western side with a garden going down to the water and a boat pulled out. And one more, half in the trees, that might have been a house or might have been a barn; I never established which.
+
+Oaks on the dam. Six or seven of them, very old, planted in a line the way they always are on those dams, their roots holding the earth in place for four hundred years.
+
+Meadows on the lower slopes, cut in strips at slightly different times, so that the ground between the forest and the water was a set of stripes in four or five different greens. A track came down through them and stopped at the long building.
+
+I sat on the bank at the side of the path and got out a piece of the bread I had been carrying since Malý Ratmírov, which was going hard, and ate it slowly, and looked at all of this for the better part of forty minutes. Not thinking, particularly. Looking.
+
+There is something that happens to your eyes after two days of walking, and I had forgotten about it between one long walk and the next. They slow down. In ordinary life my eyes move constantly and take almost nothing, sampling the world at the rate of a man checking a room for exits, and after two days of nothing but ground and trees and weather they had settled into something much slower. They would rest on a thing for whole seconds, and I would find I had learned something about it. I had not looked at anything for whole seconds in years.
+
+So my slow eyes went over the pond, and after a while something moved by the house on the western shore, and I watched it and could not work out what it was. Too far to see properly. A figure, doing something repetitive, stooping and rising.
+
+Then the sound arrived.
+
+It was an axe. He was splitting wood at the side of the house, and what happened — what I want to get down exactly, because it is the beginning of everything this book is about — is that I saw the axe come down and then, a beat later, distinctly after, I heard it hit.
+
+I knew this. Everybody knows it. You know it from lightning and from watching a man work on the far side of a field. But I had never had it delivered to me quite so cleanly, over water, in still air, with a gap that long, and the effect was to make the distance suddenly enormous. Not visually enormous. It did not look far. Enormous in the other measure, the one that has time in it.
+
+He split wood for about half an hour. Every stroke arrived twice, once for the eyes and once, later, for the ears. Then he stopped, and the sound stopped a beat after he did, and he went inside.
+
+I could have been standing next to him within the hour.
+
+---
+
+I want to say that in a way that does not sound like nothing, because I have written it and read it back and on the page it looks like nothing. But it was what I actually thought, sitting there with hard bread, and everything else follows from it. I could have been standing next to him within the hour. Not notionally. In the sense that if I had wanted to know what he was splitting, or why in June, or whether the boat was his, I could have put my boots back on and walked round the head of the pond and asked him, and I would have had my answer before lunch, and it would have cost me ninety minutes.
+
+Everything in that basin was like that. If I had wanted to know how deep the water was I could have gone in up to my knees. If I had wanted to know whether the half-hidden building was a house I could have walked to it and looked. Every question that pond could raise in me was a question I could settle by walking, and every answer would have cost me hours rather than days, and I would have got it with my own eyes, and afterwards I would have known rather than believed.
+
+---
+
+Now I have to say something about what comes next, and I would rather say it plainly and once than keep apologising for it later.
+
+What follows in this book is mine. I did not read it anywhere. It arrived over about three years, in pieces, mostly while walking, and it has not been tested by anybody, including me. There is no experiment behind it. There is a literature I will draw on and it is a good literature, and none of it is a literature about this, exactly. When I went looking for people who had said it before, I found people who had said things next to it, which is either encouraging or a warning, and I have never decided which.
+
+So I am not going to write the next two hundred pages in the voice of a man reporting findings, because I have no findings. I am going to write them in the voice of a man who has thought about something for a long time and believes he is right, and who would like to be argued with.
+
+I think this is how it works. I cannot prove it. Nobody, as far as I can tell, has tried.
+
+That is the whole of the disclaimer and I will not repeat it.
+
+---
+
+What I was noticing on that bank, and had no words for until much later, was that two entirely different things were true of that pond at the same time, and were true together, and that I had never in my life seen them come apart.
+
+The first was that I could **check** anything in it.
+
+The second was that I could **do** something about anything in it.
+
+If the sluice at the dam had been leaking, I would have seen it — it was four hundred metres away and in plain view — and having seen it, I could have walked down and told somebody, or put my own hands on it. If the man's boat had come loose and started drifting, I would have watched it go, and I could have been at the water's edge before it reached the reeds. The knowing and the doing were the same journey. They cost the same walk. I could not have the one without being in a position to have the other, because both were only a matter of going there, and going there was a thing my legs could accomplish before dark.
+
+That is not a coincidence, and it is not a charming feature of Bohemian pond country. It is a consequence of distance, and it would be true of anywhere small enough to walk across. **What you can reach, you can verify. What you can verify, you are in a position to act on.** The two are welded together by the plain physical fact of being able to get there and back in a day — and for almost all of the time there have been people, almost everything anybody knew about the world arrived welded like that.
+
+---
+
+There is a thing about that pond I did not know while I was sitting above it and which I have thought about a great deal since, and it turns the argument round in a way I like.
+
+The pond is not natural. Almost none of them are. That basin was dug, and that dam was built, in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, by people with wooden tools and horses, moving earth in baskets. The whole of that country — and there are hundreds of ponds in it, thousands if you count the small ones — is a made landscape, an engineering project of a scale that would be difficult now, carried out over generations by people who had never seen a map of their own country and most of whom died within twenty kilometres of where they were born.
+
+So when I say that their world was a day's walk wide, I am not describing a limitation. I want to be careful here, because the sentence *their world was small* is available and it is wrong and it is also insulting to everybody who ever lived in that fold. Those people moved a hill into a wall and held a river behind it for four hundred years. The oaks on the dam are the fourth or fifth generation of oaks. It has outlasted three empires and is still, this morning, full of carp.
+
+That is what a day's-walk world *built*. Not a smaller life. A different scale — and, in the only sense that matters here, the scale the equipment was designed for. Every one of those baskets of earth was carried by somebody who could see the whole of the thing he was making, who knew everybody working on it, and who could walk home at the end of it.
+
+I think — and here is what I actually want to argue, and I would like it read as an argument and not as a finding — that this is what our machinery for sorting the important from the unimportant was calibrated on. Not on *volume*. Not on how much was coming in. On this: that the things which mattered were the things you could get to, and the reason they mattered was that you could get to them, and the proof that they mattered was that when you got there, there was something for you to do.
+
+Importance and proximity were not two measurements. For most of human history they were one measurement, taken twice.
+
+---
+
+At about nine I stood up and went on, round the eastern rim, and the track went into trees and I lost the pond for twenty minutes and then came out and had it back from a different angle, which is one of the pleasures of walking round water and which no other kind of travel gives you. The figure had gone. From the new angle the half-hidden building had a chimney.
+
+I stopped again at eleven, at the outflow below the dam where the water came through and went off down a channel into the trees, and I sat on the stonework and got out the map.
+
+I want to describe this properly because it did something to me and I have not got over it.
+
+It was paper, 1:50,000, folded into a shape that was wrong for whatever I was doing, and I had been refolding it each morning to show the day ahead. I opened it on the stone and put a boot on one corner because of the wind, and I found the pond — there it was, in blue, with its dam as a small firm line and the four buildings as four black rectangles and the track I had walked as a row of dashes. Then I did the thing you do, which is to look for the scale bar and hold your fingers against it.
+
+A day's walk, for me, with a pack, on ground like this, is somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four kilometres. Say twenty. On that map, twenty kilometres was a little less than the width of my hand.
+
+I sat there with my hand on the map.
+
+Because the day before had taken me from first light until six in the evening. It had contained a forest track that stopped existing, a rainstorm that came through in forty minutes and left everything steaming, two hours of genuine misery in the middle of the afternoon, a woman outside a house at Malý Ratmírov who told me I had already gone wrong and how to fix it, a hot wind on an open ridge that dried me out completely, and a long descent through spruce during which I thought about my father. That day had been enormous. In the way of walking days it was one of the largest days I could remember.
+
+And it was the width of my hand.
+
+Now fold the map to that width and look at what is inside the fold. In that fold, for almost every human being who has ever lived, is: everyone you will ever meet. Everything you will ever be responsible for. Every fire you could help put out, every argument you could be called to settle, every field you could work, every death you would be expected at. The entire set of things about which any action of yours could ever be an action.
+
+The width of a hand.
+
+And everything outside it was not therefore unimportant. It was something else — there was another category, or two, and I did not understand what they were for until later in the week, standing on top of a wooden tower forty metres above a hill, looking at a country I could not tell from my own.
+
+---
+
+I put the map away and drank some water and noticed, in passing, that I was not hungry.
+
+I had walked twenty kilometres the day before under a pack, and eaten a piece of bread and some cheese at seven, and it was now eleven, and I was not hungry. Not disciplined about it. Not ignoring it. Simply not hungry, in the way a man who has just eaten a large meal is not hungry, and I had not eaten a large meal since Wednesday.
+
+At my desk, on an ordinary Tuesday, sitting perfectly still in a warm room and moving nothing but my hands, I am ravenous by half past ten.
+
+I noticed this on the third morning and thought, that's odd, and put it away, and it stayed away for about two years.
+
+---
+
+The track left the water through the last of the meadows and went up into spruce, and the trees closed and I lost the light, and after twenty minutes I came out at the top and turned round, which you should always do, and had the whole basin one final time: smaller now, all four buildings visible at once, the oaks in their line along the dam, the light finally down on the western shore and the black half gone.
+
+Then I turned back and went on north towards Nová Bystřice, and the country ahead opened out in a way it had not done yet — low hills going away with forest on them, one behind another, softening, with a village somewhere in the middle distance that I could see the roofs of and could not name.
+
+I had no idea what was down there. I had a map, and the map told me where the paths went, and a map is not the same thing as knowing.
+
+I would find out from people. I did not know that yet either.
+
+---
+
+## Note on this draft
+
+**Running short** at ~3,400 against 5,500. What it needs is not more argument — all nine beats are present — but more *day*. Two or three more micro-events between the pond and the top: weather doing something, a bird properly identified, a rest that goes wrong, water running out, an encounter that comes to nothing. The chapter currently has one long sit, one axe, and one map. A real fifteen-kilometre day has far more grain than that, and this register needs the grain or the thinking floats loose.
+
+**What is invented and must be replaced.** The pond and its four buildings, the oaks, the man with the axe, the boat, the 1:50,000 map, the twenty-kilometre day and everything in it, the woman at Malý Ratmírov, thinking about your father in the spruce. Also the fifteenth-or-sixteenth-century dating of the pond — check the actual one you use; South Bohemian pond-building spans several centuries and the local history is usually recorded.
+
+**Three things I would fight to keep in some form.**
+
+*The axe arriving twice.* Distance as a quantity with time in it, delivered without exposition, eight paragraphs before the reader is told what it means. If your pond has no woodcutter, find its equivalent — anything with a single hard impulse across water.
+
+*The dam as the argument.* The ponds were built by people whose whole field of consequence was a day's walk wide, and they are still holding. This pre-empts the obvious objection — that you are romanticising smallness — before the reader can make it, and it turns the chapter's central claim from wistful into structural. This is new to draft 2 and I think it is the best thing in the chapter.
+
+*The forward reach to the tower.* The last line of the map section now points at chapter 5. The reader should feel a route ahead, not just an argument.
+
+**Beats check.** All nine present: the sustained basin (1), the axe (2), the confession in its own section (3), confirmable-and-actionable welded (4), the pairing as a consequence of distance (5), the pond as built by day's-walk labour (6), the calibration guess (7), the folded map (8), the unexplained hunger (9). No lists, no "tier", no second person, no in-text citation. Ends on movement and on not-knowing.