Hypothesis

What good is preserving all these old things?

[The Scholar is dead, Egderus is dead, the Ancients are dead, all of us, sooner or later, long dead. Long beyond caring.]

It is no accident that we call a person's writings a body of work, a corpus. The literary remains. The left-behinds of a wonderful picnic, cut short by a sudden squall: the gleaners come, pick through the trash, covetous, hoarding, so soon to be picked through themselves.

Our putative author is one such temporarily able-bodied seeker. Throughout this exercise he has operated on the bread-crumb or skein-of-yarn principle, that down there (in his formulation) is a gate (trap-door?) through which we have passed (risen?) from one plenteousness into another. From throbbing dark magnificence into blinding freezing light, for example.

But the maelstrom disappears when the sea calms. Even if you could reconvene the tornado, would that help to put your house back together?

No. You put up a new house. And build the bones of your ancestors into the foundation.