xxxMolly’s Invocation – 210

A book of Adam Smith becomes a doorway, carrying Percy, Claire, and the companions into an Edinburgh dinner where philosophy and engines of industry meet.

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Dearest Companions,

Tonight the chamber opens not with thunder or lightning, but with a quieter marvel. I have been paging through Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, its arguments rippling like tides upon a shore. At first the words stayed still, dense columns of reason, but then—ah!—the margins fluttered, paragraphs loosening as though stirred by invisible hands. One page bent itself into an archway, another into a lintel, until at last the book itself became a door.

“Shall we?” I asked. Percy was already leaning forward, eyes alight, his hand reaching for Claire’s as though to steady her before a plunge. Together they stepped through, vanishing into the paper’s shimmer.

We followed after, and found ourselves in Edinburgh, in a hall lit by many lamps. The air smelled of coal smoke and roasted lamb. At the table sat men whose faces even the uninitiated would recognize from portraits: Adam Smith, his gaze mild but searching; Dugald Stewart, gesturing with the elegance of a teacher; James Watt, hands darkened with the stains of metalwork though his coat was finely cut.

The conversation wavered between philosophy and engines—how nations prosper, how pistons push. Our arrival was noticed with little surprise, as if the company had been expecting strangers from another century. Chairs were drawn up, goblets filled, and the evening began.

Yet I could sense Percy already readying his words, poetry sharpened against the stone of commerce. Claire, ever quick, whispered that this was no ordinary supper but a reckoning: ideas of liberty and wealth to be set beside the furnace of human longing.

And so, companions, the pages of Smith’s great work have become our passage. We sit now in the Scottish Enlightenment, where reason and invention dine together. Let us listen well—for from this table, the future itself may be persuaded.

— Molly