{An artificial echo machine was designed to exchange "clamore" for four echos: "amore," more," "ore," and finally "re." *}

(* "O outcry" returns as "love," "delays," "hours," and "king.")

Aside from recurrence, revision, and commensurate symbolic reference, echoes also reveal emptiness. Since objects always muffle or impede acoustic relection, only empty places can create echoes of lasting clarity.

Ironically, hollowness only increases the eerie quality of otherness inherent in any echo. Delay and fragmented repetition create a sense of another inhabiting a necessarity deserted place. Strange then how something so uncanny and outside of the self, can at the same time also contain a resilient comfort: the assurance that even if it is imaginary and at best the product of a wall, there is still something else out there, something to stake out in the face of nothingness.

An echo, while implying an enormity of a space, at the same time also defines it, limits it, and even temporarily inhabits it.

The most obsurd encounter that I am able to recall occured on the second floor of the Mugar Library.

Not far from where I was seated, there was one of those old, unabridged dictionaries splayed on a pedastal. I decided to take a quick study break to select a word of the day...I closed my eyes, and opened the book to a random page. I put my finger down. [VARNISH]. My word of the day was a glossy overcoat. A finishing touch. An afterthought. I sat back down. A few moments later, in the heat of procrastination, I returned to the book. Another word? Why not. I closed my eyes, and flipped through the pages. I put my finger down. [OIL VARNISH, see varnish]. Allow me to clarify: this was not one of those bizarre coincidences in which I happen to reopen the book to the same page, and place my finger in the same place. No. This was [O], a different letter entirely. I was redirected. How many [VARNISH] variants appear in the old, unabridged version of the dictionary on the second floor of the Mugar Library? Three. [VARNISH]; [OIL VARNISH]; and [WOOD VARNISH].
Probability: approximately 1 / 1461430.

Remove the crack, remove the problem.

That's good advice, and universally applicable.