Legomenon for UNKNOWN ANCIENTS

As these are the oldest and most fragmentary Writings in the Archives, they all but defy definitive attribution. The first group seem to share a perspective: a desperate circumstance has engulfed the world and has lasted for

The distressing {Storms and haze} describes a community paralyzed by foul weather that will not let up; in {Catastrophe}, the narrator casts about for something else to think about; {My despair} provides that topic, for a while, at least...

The same person may be speaking in {New Ecclesiastes} though the title is obscure: is 'Ecclesiastes' a person? an event? an institution? And in {Wayfarin' Stranger} — again perhaps by the same person, a musician — the narrator dreams of the 'bright world' to come, rejoining lost ones at last, if only, perhaps, after death.

Three clearly related fragments, {And as for those that are left}, {For you shall be in league with the stones}, and {The stars shone in their watches}, each contain what appears to be a citation, either of the title of the work from which they were extracted, or else the work's author — 'Leviticus' in the first Writing, 'Job' in the second, and 'Baruch' in the third. If proper names, they number among the few such in the Archives; none appears anywhere else but in these very brief Writings.

Although most of the primary material in the Archives is fragmentary, {Pastoral}, {Fallen}, and {No gifts} are the smallest — and perhaps the very oldest — scraps of writing that have been preserved. It has been opined that they are translations or adaptations of even older texts than the rest of the Writings of the Ancients. But this conjecture can, unhappily, only ever be just that.

The expression of the Author of {what it is} has proved a challenge to many a curator through the generations of the Archives' transmission. His rage is so intemperate that it sometimes drives his utterance beyond the bounds of intelligibility — a quality that comes through clearly even in the most sedate or literal rendition — though for the most part his general meaning can be guessed from context.

The peculiar {nothing at all} represents a kind of condensation of the thinking exhibited in a number of Writings from this period, though its sometimes tortuous and recursive syntax can puzzle even the doughtiest of interpreters. But its philosophical burden — ie, the emptiness of so much of the discourse of the time, can hardly be refuted.

The narrative {refugee}, one of the longest in the archives, comes the closest to providing a complete portrait of the end of the world of the Ancients, from the perspective of one in a position to see its immediate aftereffects.

In like wise, {this road} helps us appreciate what it must have been like to live that moment: one knows something has gone wrong, investigates, realizes the situation is worse than imagined (or imaginable), then finds a way to face whatever is come.