Legomenon for the Father of the Archives, the self-named LAST ONE

The Writings of the self-described Last One are naturally of the first importance, and not only because they are among the oldest primary texts in the Archives: whatever the catastrophe that brought the world of the Ancients to an end, their Author's liminal status — as one of the few who survived it — makes him the Father of the Archives, whose seed-texts comprised not only his personal jottings but also Writings from Before that were in his possession at the time.

The Writings of this Author fall into two categories: memoiric accounts of life in the immediate aftermath of the cataclysm that made him the last but one of the Ancients, and the theoretic discourse of a trenchant thinker struggling to comprehend from his lonely perspective what caused his race to self-immolate.

The earliest of this prolific Author's Writings is the apparent diary entry here called {Last One and Boy}, which is rather a composite of fragments than a consistent narrative, likely written very soon after the events it describes: the adoption of a lost young boy in the immediate aftermath of what the Last One calls 'whatever hit us'.

The lyrical {mornings of creation} presents an almost idyllic picture of the Last One's companionship with the otherwise unnamed Boy he into his care; it is instructive to compare this with the Boy's own memoir in {return}.

The somewhat later Writing {they're coming apart...} strikes a rather elegiac tone, in which the Author recalls the dear ones of his former life.

And finally among his autobiographic Writings, in {what to leave behind} the Last One considers what the Boy will need after he is left alone...

As mentioned, it was almost certainly the Last One whose holdings constituted the anthology of texts Egderus later used to form the Archives bearing his name. In addition to his fragmentary memoirs, the Last One brought to bear his considerable intellect in Writings that, taken together, contain what might be called the distillation of his thought.

In a kind of prolegomenon, the gnomic {impatience}, the Last One opens his discursus by indirectly proposing that the lack (or failure) of forbearance may be his besetting sin, by declaring what brings in his nemeses, the ghosts.

His foundational document, as it were, is {the ghosts}, which has drawn particular attention (much of it needlessly unkind, it must be said) on account of its unusual theme, leading some to ascribe this peculiar text not to an Ancient author, but to the much more recent creator (or creators) of the Romantic Impulse Writings — indeed, its peculiarity has prompted more than one accusation that the whole lobe of Writings attributed to the Last One is a fabrication — or, to be more generous, the invention of (a) fabulist(s).

Need it be said? — all of the Writings in the Archives are susceptible to that kind of nihilistic joykilling, which serves no other purpose than to poison the well for everyone else.

The diatribe {The Perpetrated World} sets forth the principle upon which the entire discourse rests: that the whole world we live in is a ghostly fabrication, an illusion made entirely out of text.

Three corollaries follow: {Every artifact is a transmission} notes not only the profusion of text into the very objects that make up our daily lives, but also its delusory nature; {sail away} describes the intoxicating sweep of this kind of life; and {transport} proposes the further principle that text is the very dwelling place of the ghosts.

A last pronouncement bookends the more or less formal discussion that begins with the invocatory {impatience}: in the acerbic {enemy}, the Last One reformulates his oft-expressed hostility towards text itself. (An earlier Curator perceived in these two offerings technical matters that prompted lengthy comment; this material has been removed to a separate Scholion {On impatience and the enemy}.)

Given the Last One's antagonism towards text, the answer to the bitter riddle posed in {another life form} cannot be hard to guess.

The peculiar thought experiment {mirror} implies that it may have been this invention which ultimately led to the fatal calamity that destroyed the world of his contemporaries. More broadly, in {Last One flying}, he seems to indict technology itself for their (and his) ruin.

However that may be, in the almost scriptural language of {deities}, the Last One demonstrates a lyrical gift, outlining his spiritual journey from youthful faith through disillusionment to the peace he may have attained at his end, when the vaporous compulsions of the world dissolve like mist in the sun, landing him on the shore of silence and serenity at last.