In certain books—not all—but in certain books I began to notice additional writing that could only be seen when the motion of the eye causes the letters to streak. It’s like...bits of the letters are incorporated, or partially incorporated, into the lettering of the text, so that you wouldn’t notice them if you were reading normally. Only when the eye scans the line like a camera, without saccadic blindness, the streaking actually causes these hidden bits of letters to resolve into distinct characters. All these passages I’ve just shown you are taken from your assigned books and from your own writing. I can show you!

See? The camera in the phone does not suppress anything it sees, just like the unedited feed from the optic nerve. As you move it over the text—watch the screen—see? There! That in there, when you move it—that’s a letter, see it? That’s another there, and there, another one. These three, that I’ve written down here. Here, I’ll do it again. See them? Would they be so consistent, pass by pass, if they were only random distortions of the text? I mean, I’m not stupid, I realized at once that this could be just some, you know, compulsive, pattern-finding tendency of my brain, but these letters come out in the same places, the same way, every time. I mean, that is a letter A isn’t it? And that is a lowercase L there, right? You can even see that it isn’t an uppercase I. And that’s an O, not just some circle; the sides are thicker than the top and bottom. Now look here—that’s an N...And there’s the E.

Exactly. Alone. It repeats over and over throughout the article. Now, did you do that? Of course not! Who is going to write the word “alone” secretly throughout a whole article, dozens of times? But how could something this consistent, this coherent, come about by pure chance? But you know what’s even weirder? It isn’t consistent from one copy to the next. Like in this copy, there’s nothing, at least, I haven’t been able to find anything. But in this one, you don’t get this “alone” text, you get this: see... there’s an L... an O... then an S... T... N... O... W... then L again... O again... S again... T... and that’s it for the article. It just says “lost now lost.”