A convention centre with capacity for four thousand

The idea was not silly and the people behind it were not cranks. Their reasoning was that a species which has undergone a change of state and never marked it will keep behaving as though the change is still pending, and that the marking is not decoration — it is the mechanism by which a transition is closed and a new name takes hold.

They had read their van Gennep. That was the whole problem, and they were the only ones who could see it, and they could not get anyone to take it seriously as an emergency.

So they did what remained. They booked a hall, drafted a text, and set a date. There would be a statement of what had been left, a period of silence, and a naming. It was announced eighteen months out.

The commentary was not hostile. It was worse. It was interested. There were long pieces about whether the date was well chosen, whether the wording was adequate, who had been consulted, and whether a ceremony convened by a committee could confer anything on anyone. All of it was intelligent and all of it was written from outside, by people describing an event, which is the one posture from which a rite cannot be attended.

On the day the hall was about a third full and the proceedings ran forty minutes short. The silence was observed. The naming was read. Afterwards people stood in the foyer and were, by every account, faintly embarrassed, and went to find somewhere to eat.

The name did not take. There is no record of it in general use. Two of the organisers gave interviews some years later; one had come to think the attempt was necessary and premature, and the other said that she had understood, standing at the lectern and looking at the empty third of the room, that there was nobody left outside the rite to receive them back, and that this had been true since before any of them were born, and that she had known it in 1909 in a book and had not known it until that afternoon.

Aggregation requires a society that is not itself in the margin. There isn’t one. The hall is still there and is used for trade shows.