The Rider in the Margin

In the thirteenth century, a seven-year-old boy named Onfim sat at a wooden bench in northern Rus' with an iron-pointed stylus and a soft strip of peeled birch bark. He was supposed to be practicing his alphabet. You can still see the top-left corner where he tried to behave: two neat rows of letters scored dutifully into the grain, and a third row that makes it five characters across before his patience ran out.

In the wide honey-colored expanse to the right of his homework box, the boy drew what he actually wanted to be doing. He scratched a long-necked horse with four stick legs and a streaming tail, put himself in the saddle with a pointed cap and five enormous rake-tine fingers raised in triumph, drove a diagonal lance past his horse's hooves into a fallen foe, and carved his own name right beside his head so nobody could mistake the hero.

When he was done, the strip of bark was tossed into the wet street mud outside, where the airless clay kept every ridge and furrow intact for seven hundred years while the grand parchment chronicles in the stone libraries above burned to ash. Almost nothing built to look important survives unmodified—but a bored seven-year-old daydreaming in the margin of his spelling drill rode straight through seven centuries without losing a single finger.