Get This: The Longest Story Ever Told

If you subscribe to Opium Magazine, your newest issue has a treat: the cover story will take 1,000 years to read.  And it’s only nine words long.  Created by some fancy-thinkin’ conceptual “artist” out in “San” Francisco named Jonathan Keats, the story works like this: every century or so, the exposure of light to the cover will reveal a new word in the story.

The cover is printed in a double layer of standard black ink, with an incrementally screened overlay masking the nine words. Exposed over time to ultraviolet light, the words will be appear at different rates, supposedly one per century.

But what is the story about?  

First – why is this character pulling this zany art stunt?

“Like most people, I live my life in a rush, consuming media on the run,” said Keats, “That may be fine for reading the average blog,” he said, “but something essential is lost when ingesting words is all about speed. My thousand-year story is an antidote. Given the printing process I’ve used, you can’t take in more than one word per century. That’s even slower than reading Proust.”

Oh ho, take that, Proust, you twathead!  But won’t the magazine paper itself decompose over the centuries?

“The high-quality acid-free paper on which Opium is printed will certainly last that long,” Keats answered. “Whether humankind will, of course, remains an open question.”

Well now we have an incentive not to destroy our very species for at least another thousand years or else we’ll never learn how the story ends.

The joke will be on the future of humankind when they find out in 3009 that it’s just the lyrics of Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” hastily and imperfectly remembered by Keats.

Source: Wired.