Legomenon for VOICE from the LOCUST GROVE

It is unusual (and unusually valuable) when two Authors in the Archives corroborate one another's accounts: where their descriptions of events agree, we can take them as having happened as described; where they differ, we can evaluate each narrative in the light of the other, thereby enlarging our understanding, not only of their authors' motivations, but also of the context out of which they speak. Such is the case between this Author and the Scholar who discovered the Archives, the latter of whom is without doubt the drunken man who appears suddenly in the place which gives the former a name.

In the first of this Author's Writings, {The Locust Grove}, probably written years after the events it recounts, the narrator witnesses what appears to be the immediate aftermath of the Scholar's audience with the Council, during which his work was confiscated and he was dismissed from the Conference. The speaker is shaken by this scene, an inner event that bears fruit much later.

The next, {The Retreat House} would seem to be a sequel, which may well once have been contiguous with its predecessor narrative. This harrowing tale is without precedent in the archives, and some dubious critics have proposed that it is the evil fantasy — or, to be generous, an hallucination — of a mind unhinged.

Be that as it may, the remaining documents ascribed to this Author bespeak a benison that nearly unbearable suffering — real or imagined, it must be said — sometimes grants its subject. In {midnight_pain}, which seems to be a composite document, the sufferer finds comfort and even solace from an unlikely source; {The Man in the Moon} is a mere scrap, but its compressed image has great power; while {Peripatikos Soter}, whose opening paragraphs are much damaged (or deranged), finally confers upon the narrator an unlooked-for blessing — a totally improbable one, say the skeptics, as is their wont in such situations. One is tempted to respond, As the Remnant say, Refusing to believe protects you from nothing.

This very peculiar Writing invites further consideration. As with each of the Romantic Impulse Writings, this text may be an unfinished draft or collection of sketches never completed, or whose finished version has since been lost. It is included here because of the obvious importance of the tale it tells: it definitively proposes that the Locust Grove Author later became one of the Curators of the Archives, who dug out of the ruins of the Temple the materials that were originally discovered and collected by the Scholar, which were then confiscated after his disastrous presentation to the Convention. Nowhere else in the Archives is such direct evidence of transmission to be found: in all other cases, it must be hypothesized (or merely asserted) that such&such a person received the Archives from such&such another.

Naturally, many questions arise. When and how was the Temple destroyed? In what form did this Rescuer transmit the Archives, after working on them for an unknown period and to an unknown extent — and to whom? The history and mechanism of the Archives' transmission from this Author's era to our own is even more murky than that from Egderus' time to the Scholar's, because both Egderus and the Scholar give clues, however indistinct, as to what was retrieved and what was passed on.

And what is the provenance of the bizarre Title of this Writing, and who is responsible for it? 'Peripatikos'? 'Soter'? No convincing etymology has been proposed for either word, as they are unique to the Archives, and may represent a retrieval from an ancient (or secret) language as yet unknown to us. One suggestion has been to analogize it to the nams 'Egderus Scriptor', so that 'Soter' could be a cognomen, and here might mean Rescuer or Savior of the Archives — if the whole Title of the Writing is the Author's denomination rather than a descriptor of the story it tells.

On the other hand, it has been suggested, on the basis of the kind of life this person leads, that 'Peripatikos' — rather than being a given name such as 'Egderus' or 'Markito' — is a sort of 'occupational' name, and could denote 'wanderer', vagabond', or even 'vagrant', someone without employment or position within civilized society — and further, in the instance of this particular person, someone who indeed shuns such a position as an odious entanglement, or in any case has little interest in (re)joining such a world. For a fuller treatment of this subject in a Writing sometimes also attributed to this unknown Author, see {The Land Where No Man Is}.

Finally, the fragmentary {only I can do} is the last Writing in the Archives to be positively identified as coming from the Locust Grove Author. Some of this narrative's elements are echoed in the more recent {conspiracy} by an Unknown Scholastic who may have known this Author well. The supposition that this Author actively transmitted the Archives to that former colleague can only be that, a guess based mainly upon a heartfelt wish on our part that it be so.