"Though we had many pieces, we did not have the whole.
It was thirty years before we deciphered the formula.
But we did it at last.
There at night in the darkness of Fourier’s laboratory,
the four of us stood and watched the philosophers’ stone
forming in the crucible."
— The Eight , by Katherine Neville
(2008 Ballantine Books mass market edition, p. 640)
A journal post from August 25, 2009:
Image from a different journal earlier that same day, August 25, 2009:
Thirty-year medallion from Alcoholics Anonymous —
See also, in this journal, "The Eight" + Damnation.