Introduction to The Complete and Collected Works of Patrick Knightsworth
(Volume I, Section I – Surviving Fragment)

The publication of The Complete and Collected Works of Patrick Knightsworth is a literary happening like no other. At 1,900 volumes, this remarkable anthology surpasses – without contest – both in ambition and execution any other known work of art so far produced on this planet. There is nothing approximating its kind, and to enlist so insufficient a word as unique is to do both the work and the man behind it a grave disservice.

It is at once a work of literature, psychology, geology, physics, and philosophy; an encyclopaedia, a diary, and an authoritative textbook for a great number of disciplines yet to be properly formulated.

Contrary to what is certainly be the case with many (if not all) of Knightsworth’s readers, I am among the rare few still living who have made their way through the entire collection. Nonetheless, prudence dictates that my remarks be received with that cautious incredulity properly afforded to any witness too long and too closely bound to genius. However, unlike the great many critics who have commented upon Knightsworth – his life and legacy – I happened to have known him as a friend. Further to that, I consider myself his first and most attentive brother in blood and spirit; that is, at least until his much-speculated retreat from public life – after which I did not entirely cease contact with the man, as will be explained to anyone not already familiar with me and my contribution to the work.

As such, I beg the reader to appreciate my deep and long-attending loyalty to Patrick Knightsworth. Any instance in which I might be reasonably charged with over-stepping my place and speaking on behalf of the author, I hope may be forgiven as well-intentioned familiarity rather than frivolous conjecture. Extraordinary a life as it may have been, Knightsworth’s was, after all, the story of a single human being; and impossible as it may be to distil the details of so prodigious an author’s career and character into anything as pithy as a literary introduction, I will nonetheless attempt – given the sheer time required to read through so incredible a mass of material as is contained in this collection – to touch upon some of the more outstanding incidents and periods of the man’s, until now, little-known existence.

Patrick Edward Knightsworth was born on 25 June 1903 to Richard and Mary Knightsworth (née Lincoln) in Hampstead Village, North London. The Knightsworths were a prominent family of old British nobility with roots traceable to the tenth-century Saxon chieftain and mystic, Ælfnod the Obsessive. The family is perhaps best known in modern times by way of Sir Alexander Knightsworth II who, in 1785, founded the Knightsworth Biscuit Company in Bermondsey, South-East London. Inheriting the business following the death of his spinster aunt Margaret from pneumonia in the northern Crimea in 1856, Richard grew the Knightsworth Biscuit Company 1 from a small, locally managed baker’s shop into a sprawling, obscenely profitable confectionery empire whose sugared exports sweetened the tongues – and, some claimed, the morals – of half the civilised world.

An only child, young Patrick was educated at the family home by his father before entering Trinity College, Oxford, in 1919 as a dual doctoral candidate in Advanced Bacterial Growth on Variably Controlled Semi-Organic Cultures and The Shortcomings of Formal Education as a Substantive Model for Economic Stimulation. Taking full advantage of a then barely understood loophole in the university’s constitution, Patrick devised the latter programme himself. Even now, I often reflect upon it with fond recollection. Barely into early adulthood, an energetic, iron-spirited Patrick successfully formulated, researched, drafted, and submitted a department-creation request to a still very much Victorian-minded, risk-averse academic and administrative body. The project was granted approximately two hundred and thirty-five thousand pounds – accorded over the course of eight terms. In addition to creating the department and inhabiting the role of its head, Patrick – besides myself – was the sole student to pass through this short-lived course of study. A definite boost to our reputations immediately following matriculation, we both made the national press for jointly receiving the highest grade yet awarded to any students of any subject in Oxford’s millennia-spanning history.

With my utmost admiration for Knightsworth and his steadfast dedication to the capital-T and underlined Truth in mind, I owe it here to speak candidly. My meeting with, and befriending of, Patrick in those initial and chaotic moments of student induction were by no means coincidental. It was by design of his father, Richard, that we should inevitably cross paths. For my services I charged the full payment of my tuition and boarding, with meals, a generous yearly stipend, and holidays thrown in for good measure. The task was simple: introduce and acclimatise Patrick to the proper conventions of ordinary society. Being myself a former boarder and graduate of Eton, even as a scholarship boy, I am not persuaded that my view of the world could be described as particularly grounded. Nevertheless, following my meeting with Richard, I immediately vacated my as-yet finalised place in the engineering school to join Knightsworth’s controversial programme.

My professional duties aside, young Knightsworth proved to be a popular student with little need of my assistance. Fortunately for me, however, his father had paid me upfront. Almost immediately he became well known around the campus for his irreverent wit and amusingly indecent scribblings on the walls of the student and faculty toilets. From our first conversations it was evident that he was an engaging and unnervingly perceptive young man. Trite as it may be to say, there was something very different about this unusual and confident boy from London.

Beyond his formidable intellect and prodigious memory for the smallest particulars of any discourse, Patrick displayed an uncommon aptitude for discerning and eliciting the deeper sympathies of those with whom he conversed. It was a spectacle of no ordinary fascination, and at many a dinner party or gala I had occasion to observe its full exercise. By the most innocuous lines of inquiry, Patrick would unerringly locate and decode the innermost workings of his fellow guests’ characters without ever seeming intrusive or impolite: cutting through that misdirecting and entirely false persona we are all guilty of adopting in public, and laying bare the true essence of what made them the persons they were.

To those who enjoyed the privilege of conversing with him, he appeared a whimsical – if occasionally vulgar – companion; yet within him resided a rare and disquieting gift: an instinct to scent out and expose his interlocutors’ deepest fears and insecurities, to strip them of every artifice of pomp and bluster, and, on occasion, to reduce them to tears in an instant.

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Before embarking on a discussion that would usually conclude with last-orders arguments at the bar about the supernatural and other teleological matters, it is perhaps worthwhile to clarify that Patrick’s seemingly inexplicable mental abilities, though often misunderstood and occasionally misrepresented by others, were subject to certain mortal imperfections of the kind that beset even the greatest minds.

Very often, during one of his more impassioned disquisitions, he was met with looks of exhaustion and faint annoyance from his interlocutors, among them future members of the British Cabinet, several foreign dignitaries, and, in time, his wife.

Kindly also accept my admission that many of us had been heavily experimenting with, and, in turn, reporting on, the effects of prolonged exposure to high doses of powerfully psychoactive substances during this time, invariably achieved through the consumption of large quantities of crudely synthesised, highly toxic, and “mind-explodingly” potent chemicals (Vol. 122, p. 3). Unfortunately, in those days no scientific journal worth its salt would so much as entertain publishing any of our scarcely coherent, clinically unverified, and most sternly, institutionally rejected findings.

It was during one of these research sessions that Knightsworth met his future wife, Agatha Sullivan, by way of a formal complaint she had lodged with the faculty about the unusual noises emanating from the laboratory two floors above her own. On receiving word of the complaint, Patrick sought out the red-haired chemistry student in hopes of resolving the matter, and was instantly besotted. While Sullivan did not, at first, share Patrick’s feelings of immediate infatuation, she reluctantly agreed to accompany him to the theatre that evening, and slowly a romance blossomed between them.

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Earning his qualifications earlier than anticipated, in 1921 Patrick took an unpaid position at The London Times,continuing in a visiting capacity, as head of his self-devised department until I had completed my studies the following year (after which the “department” – whose staff consisted of a single employee, Patrick – was dissolved, and generous redundancy terms honoured). During my final year I received a couriered letter from Knightsworth inviting me to take up the role of his professional sub-editor. With no clear prospect of employment upon graduation, I found the offer both flattering and well timed. Moments after receiving the message, I dispatched the courier back to Knightsworth – my acceptance enclosed – thereby acquiring, at a stroke, the second and, from then on, only client from whom I have earned my living. Never could I have supposed that I was not merely taking on a job, but forming an eternal bond with Patrick and his artistic labours. I doubt he foresaw it either, though a small part of me suspects I may be wrong.

Working with the paper for the next decade, he produced a wildly popular daily column covering a dazzling range of topics and events: botany, politics, proper home-rifle maintenance, culinary arts, aesthetics, fashion, economics, metallurgy, the Spanish-Moroccan War, the first World Cup Final from Montevideo, Uruguay2, and much else besides. In 1931 the paper published the first collected omnibus of Patrick’s writing: an experimental and heavily annotated compilation of essays and articles interwoven with passages from ancient pagan coming-of-age rituals and illustrations of contemporary cigarette-lighter designs.

Initial reservations from retailers aside, the book’s reasonable commercial success is often cited as the prototype of what is now called a sleeper hit,earning the author immediate recognition in critical circles and a modest but fervent public. One (alas, unverified) anecdote relates that a copy was once glimpsed atop the toilet seat in the private bathroom of one Comrade Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili – or “that Georgian wanker, Stalin” (Vol. 32, p. 3), as Patrick referred to him. The secure transmission of this intelligence to the West is said to have cost the lives of three men, including the witness to Stalin’s bathroom reading habits: a revolution-surviving, purge-avoiding, university-educated linen-housemaid.

Eleven further collections were to follow over the next five years, each released to mixed commercial fortunes but to considerable and consistent critical praise. Unsatisfied with the constraint of being expected to write only a single article each day, “like a hen shitting out an egg in the morning” (Vol. 46, p. 756), Patrick vacated his role at The London Times and devoted the next half-dozen years to composing his first autobiographical work. The result: a thirty-four-volume series published across eight years. While the books more than recouped their costs, any fanfare attending each release was brief and quick to fade. In 1942 he married Sullivan and published his first and only collection of poetry,a daring and unapologetically intimate venture which, to the public’s shame, went largely unappreciated – and is probably best forgotten altogether.

Knightsworth would dedicate a further seven memoirs to recalling the years he had spent devising, composing, and publishing those earlier works, together with the experimental book of verse. Released when my friend was barely forty-one years of age, they would, until now, stand as his only published output for more than half a century. In the meantime, commentary on his later life was confined to the numerous unofficial and wholly unauthorised biographies issued by tangential acquaintances and cash-strapped sycophants in need of an easy shilling.

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As years lengthened into decades, the stream of commercial and academic interest around Knightsworth dried, like a river to clay. Like so many authors before him, his name seemed to evaporate from the literary map, or so it appeared at the time.

Why Knightsworth chose to withhold the bulk of his writing from public view until so long after his death remains uncertain. A joke I once heard at a conference proposed that he was simply too busy to publish; rest assured, I saw to it that the professor responsible for so flippant a remark was permanently blacklisted. Further deepening the mystery, Knightsworth’s last will and testament specifies, quite unambiguously, that the final manuscript of his mammoth project be sealed and stored at the headquarters of the Lloyd’s Banking & Repository Company for no fewer than twenty years after his passing.

With the release of a subsequent 1,846 volumes, we find ourselves at the dawn of what will surely be remembered as a pivotal milestone in the history of Western letters. Having awaited this moment for so many years, I can think of no person more eager than myself to witness the books at last reaching the shelves. Cumulatively, I must have lost decades of sleep fearing I might be pushing up daisies before the works saw daylight. When, at last, I received that long-awaited instruction from Patrick’s estate, at the very least, it relieved my long-suffered chronic bowel difficulties.

From the outset of these newly authorised documents one notices an abrupt shift in Knightsworth’s approach to prose. Departing from the broad, surface-focused style of his early journalism and the fragmentary reminiscences of his memoirs, he undertakes a comprehensive and lyrical examination of each day almost as it occurs: conversations with neighbours, meals with friends, episodes of love-making with his spouse. This is no matter of interpretive fashion; Knightsworth is explicit as to his revised ambition, to capture and articulate the entirety of his life’s experience in its most minute particulars. Or, as he writes, “to give voice to every moment of existence” (Vol. 352, p. 3).

From this recalibrated start Knightsworth embarked upon the gargantuan endeavour that consumed all his remaining time and energy. The results—an ever-swelling ledger of the lived, would sit, for a quarter-century, hidden in an underground bank vault in Central London.

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Barely weeks into this revised vision we encounter one of the more notable and unfortunate turns in Patrick’s long and fruitful life. As was reported in several nationally circulated newspapers and newsreels at the time, in the spring of 1943 his beloved Agatha suffered the first of what would become many psychotic breakdowns. The eventual diagnosis, its nomenclature then unsettled, would later be recognised by the psychiatric community as a borderline personality disorder, characterised chiefly by delusional paranoia and abusive behavioural tendencies. In the summer of 1944 she was committed to a mental institution following an incident in which she attacked Patrick with a claw-hammer.

…sustained several broken fingers while restraining his wife, who had approached him silently as he worked at his desk. Despite his injuries he was soon back at work. After recounting the attack over two pages that year (Vol. 57, pp. 72–74), the name Agatha Sullivan does not appear again in his writings. In later volumes, however, one finds passing complaints of a stiffness in his right hand.

Considering the frequently remarked-upon closeness of their marriage before that dark year3, it is notable that Patrick makes little further reference to his wife or her character, save for the occasional observation that her behaviour and temperament could be inconsistent. Sullivan was never published during her lifetime, nor have any of her private writings been released posthumously.

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Though ostensibly no longer a man of letters in print, Knightsworth and his goings-on, remained subjects of public interest and speculation, particularly within the British and international tabloid press (this owed as much to his social standing as to his literary efforts). As a consequence of his by-then firmly established reputation and the high regard customarily afforded to those born into considerable wealth, Patrick spent many years seated at the very centre of twentieth-century Britain’s artistic and intellectual establishment, attending hundreds of academic, diplomatic, religious, and sporting events over the next half-decade.

That is not to say he was the most popular of fixtures at such gatherings. There is, for example, the notorious incident of an exuberant and incoherent Patrick being forcibly removed from the United Grand Lodge of England in Covent Garden, London. The matter is well documented both in these Complete Works (Vol. 91, pp. 100–190) and amply attested throughout the numerous, and now, it must be conceded, vindicated, biographies, salacious magazine features, and lurid television documentaries that have traded on the Knightsworth name for half a century.

With hindsight it seems only fitting that a man such as Patrick should have found himself amongst a newly emergent and influential circle of post-war intellectuals. An enthusiastic custodian of well-intentioned ideas and original thinking, Knightsworth set about approaching the greatest minds in their respective fields, carefully recording the most pressing artistic, technological, scientific, practical, philosophical, mathematical, and political concerns of the age. As Patrick’s curiosity quickened, so too did the scope of his enterprise.

At various points he confesses to a “punishing dread” that his life might then be divided into three parts: one-third spent seeking out and exposing himself to new ideas; a second devoted to painstakingly transcribing those conversations; and the concluding portion of this “overly intellectual and pretentious triumvirate” (Vol. 91, pp. 200–202) spent critiquing and synthesising the newly acquired knowledge against his “near universe of preceding ignorance” (ibid.).

In a letter of suggestion addressed to the Department of Education, Knightsworth proposed that the British public school system adopt a similar approach in cultivating the nation’s most eager young minds. In return he received a bottle of supermarket wine and a complimentary fruit basket from the minister’s office, together with a polite instruction never to contact them again. Whether this was one of Patrick’s more satirical sallies remains unknown.

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As well as displaying his multitudinous virtues, the work also reveals, if only to the inattentive eye, those few occasions on which Knightsworth’s visionary theories were cruelly misunderstood or imperfectly realised in practice: his brief and daring explorations into fluid mechanics, the then incipient science of computational machinery, and the still embryonic discipline of game theory. That unfortunate accidents and miscalculations sometimes attended the practical application of his ideas is, I think, less a reflection on Patrick’s genius than on the lamentable inadequacies of those charged with executing it.

Yet, in the spirit of full candour, and with the pain of an old friend who must tell an unflattering truth, one cannot deny that the collapsed bridges, the out-of-court settlements, and the biographies of grieving litigants do, alas, speak loudly enough for themselves. Nor is that to overlook the regrettable and frequently unreliable testimonies of town-planning authorities, engineering firms, and various governmental agencies, who claimed to have received a flurry of letters, each handsomely watermarked with the Knightsworth insignia, arriving uncannily close in proximity to certain fatal mishaps in their respective districts.

Nevertheless, contrary to the murmurings circulating through those burgeoning electronic gossip-rings and amateur data networks that have lately become fashionable among younger academics, there had never been any public admission on Patrick’s part of his connection to such calamitous events. With the release of the Complete Works, however, Knightsworth’s involvement in each disastrous accident to which his name was attached is confirmed beyond dispute. Before yielding to the fashionable temptation to malign him as some species of moral aberration, driven solely by self-interest and almost wholly lacking in accountability, I must point out that Patrick never laid claim to perfection. Or, to paraphrase Patrick, “These things, unfortunately, occur4.”

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Detouring from my biographical duties, I wish briefly to touch on the style of Knightsworth’s writing. Patrick’s facility with the English language is as brilliant, and as resonant, as the work is long: prose that never so much as skirts the outer limits of what might be regarded as gratuitous, trite, trope-stained, purple, clichéd, or crabbed. Time and again he skilfully reconciles passages of luxuriantly ornate recollection with flashes of immediate, lean practicality, guiding the reader on a technicolour, ever-changing journey through his dynamic inner world. An elegant and precise creation, the work seems to accommodate every style and genre one could imagine; indeed, Knightsworth appears to invent several new forms along the way, drawing upon elements as various as eighteenth-century Rococo, Anglo-Saxon blank verse, American postmodernism, social realism, magical realism, DADA, self-help, and countless others.

He is both the observer and the principal agent of action at any moment, ever present, our raconteur, guide, friend, and pedagogue on this remarkable voyage through whatever manifestation of his life he elects to comment upon. In his pages Patrick seems acutely perceptive to almost everything occurring in any given moment. Consider, further, that most of what he wrote was set directly from mind to page, requiring neither revision nor redraft. As his sub-editor, I rarely received a piece that necessitated any sort of grammatical or orthographical correction.

The everyday figures and encounters of the most quotidian interactions, consultations with doctors; arguments with house-staff, cooks, and the like, are rendered with astonishing particularity; surely these persons and episodes will one day be regarded among the most finely limned characters and chapters in our literature. Occasionally, given my knowledge of Patrick’s life, and knowing I would one day be called upon to supply this introduction, I confess I sometimes feel I have lived as one of his characters myself. Indeed, there are mornings when I wake uncertain whether a memory is mine or his: a conversation I cannot recall having, a room I remember describing but never entering, a smell of pipe-tobacco I have not known in years. After seventy-four years spent reading him, annotating him, thinking in his rhythms, I often wonder whether what I call my own life might not, in truth, be a late addition to his. I must, however, respect his decision to omit any reference to me, or to our association, from his writing.

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Perhaps here lies the suitable porthole through which to dive back into the officially confirmed details of Patrick’s life, and, at the same time, to explore further this colossal literary accomplishment. You will have to forgive me: after all these years I often confuse the two.

As he entered his later years, the burden of public life and the drudgery of capturing the slightest detail of every social engagement became too taxing to continue. The geometric patterns and phenotypic diversity of floral arrangements; the colour schemes and fabrics of soft furnishings; every suspected ingredient of a lady’s perfumes; the ranking of the firmness of each handshake; the overheard utterances, the energetic disagreements, the varying quality of the hors d’oeuvres, the stilted conversation with the taxi-driver on the way home – et cetera, et cetera – all became too much. Complaining of a feeling of being increasingly smothered by the workload generated by mere attendance, Knightsworth gradually withdrew from public appearances altogether, preferring instead to remain at home to watch, transcribe, and analyse his favourite soap-opera stories and game shows.

Though a prolific letter-writer for most of his life, this pursuit also was eventually abandoned as he judged the practice an unproductive deviation from his primary labours.

As far back as those innocent and gay days at Oxford, Patrick would often refer to himself as a man starved of time. Only these many years later can I fully appreciate how serious in his conviction he already was.

Eventually he relinquished reading altogether, blaming the fatigue produced by the obligation to copy thousands of pages in order to properly record everything he had read; and then, having commented on the material, to describe the process of transcription itself and the means by which he had arrived at his conclusions, an account which, logically, also required further documentation. In place of this never-to-be-revisited pastime there is, however, exhaustive coverage of his financial accounts and weekly budgets; hand-drawn maps of his walking routes about the house; short biographies of everyone encountered en route; and measurements of everything ingested and, with equal conscientiousness, expelled.

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I venture the first critical opinion here: we are witnessing the slow spectacle of a man folding in upon himself.

Across the years and volumes one observes a steady decrease in Knightsworth’s attention to events in the news and a compensating expansion devoted to matters which, had they been written by anyone else, might seem trivial: the length of his nasal hairs, the precise duration of his morning bath, the viscosity of his morning porridge. At one point not a single waking breath goes undocumented, and with almost breathtaking specificity. These moments are a joy to the patient reader, though they will not endear themselves to the more casual enthusiast.

This doubling-over of Knightsworth’s psyche is evident not only in the content but in the manner of its production, in the noticeable alteration of his working schedule. As a younger man he preferred to sit at his writing table after breakfast, the early hours given to recalling dreams and assessing the quality of the previous night’s sleep, followed, more often than not, by a walk in his grounds, a spot of lunch, a cup of tea, and then a return to work. Considering the sheer volume of writing he produced in youth, his pace was far more relaxed than posterity is likely to imagine.

As he grew older, writing became the only item of real importance in his timetable. It was the first thing he did upon opening his eyes; and it is rumoured that even as he fell asleep, he would be composing notes to be taken up in the morning. This practice, as he remarks elsewhere, cost him hours of unrest when attempting to sleep, for he seemed unable to turn off his mind. In hundreds of entries, Patrick writes that his dreams were filled only with anxiety at being away from his desk and typewriter.

In time, and likely in consequence, his sleep patterns became erratic; he notes prolonged periods in which he seems unable to distinguish waking reality from sleeping rest. Distressing though these passages must have been to live, they rank among the finest he committed to the page.

In due course he began to document, with mathematical precision, every activity implicated in writing. Having described the ingredients, nutritional content, and act of eating his breakfast, he would next outline the conception of the wording used in that description; then the process of documenting that process; and so on, trapped in a cognitive loop, like the ancient Ouroboros, the serpent consuming its own tail. Entire weeks might be devoted to such activity. Only the mercy of some intrusion, a new smudge on a windowpane, a sudden downpour outside, could break the circle and restore him to a more typical subject.

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Eventually Knightsworth set aside every activity not related to writing. He even forwent visits to the lavatory, working in adult nappies. Relocating permanently to his writing room, he ordered that all meals be liquidised and supplied through a straw with minimal interruption.

On the surface this appears a melancholy development. The widely accepted wisdom about artists is that age brings a loss of fidelity. For Knightsworth, the opposite seems true. In his most advanced years, when his contemporaries were long into retirement, Patrick, until then exclusively a writer of non-fiction, turned his attention to fiction with the fullest stretch of his imagination. The ensuing thirty-two operas, seventy-two plays, and five hundred and forty-six sonnets are testimonies to a clear-headed and finely tuned artistic sensibility. Indeed, there are moments when one is compelled to recall a certain bard from Stratford-upon-Avon; though I have yet to find any evidence that he ever actually read any Shakespeare at all.

In the end, however, he returned to documentary work. What I found most sad-and most revealing-about those late volumes is that, having severed himself from the world, I became the only other person in Patrick’s life besides the characters he was still creating. I read everything: the complaints about declining health; the attempts to medicate himself by post; the unremitting anxiety that he might die before completing the manuscript.

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It has been reverently attested that Patrick completed his final page at the very instant of his passing, on 21 January 1993. At that time only a minute fraction of the work had reached publication; for more than a quarter-century (allowing for the stately pace of legal bureaucracy) the overwhelming remainder lay hidden from the world until the execution of Knightsworth’s last will and testament. Thereafter, the independently briefed executive board -charged with issuing this auspicious and surely world-altering first edition in its entirety, according to the author’s exacting and generously financed specifications – was swiftly assembled.

Following several delays, not least the considerable time and expense incurred in fulfilling Knightsworth’s own specification that the entire work be printed on eighteenth-century Japanese gampi paper, of which a gargantuan quantity had to be procured, the project at last advanced. The wider procurement of wood-mills, glue-producers, and binding workshops seconded to Knightsworth Industries would merit a doctoral inquiry in economics of its own, and must be omitted here.

Anticipating the unwillingness of any and all leading commercial or specialised academic houses to hazard 1,900 volumes of a masterpiece printed on so ruinously unprofitable a medium, Knightsworth sold off substantial portions of his estate to endow the first edition himself. For this one feels gratitude to Knightsworth, not only for the work itself, nor merely for so exquisite a celebration of the craft of the press, but also for keeping the Inland Revenue scratching their heads for at least the next thirty years.

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In the early months of 1993, Knightsworth was found lifeless at his Hampstead Village home; the cause was determined to be heart failure. He was seated at his desk, as ever. Before him lay his blue Olivetti typewriter. In it: the final page of the manuscript. Written upon that page what is certain to become one of the most contested sentences in literary history-two words: “I die.” A personal pronoun and a verb. Did he complete the work, or was he caught short as he reached for “I died”? Was it, perhaps, a meticulously planned and executed practical joke – a goof?

Consider that while the sizable majority of the work is written in the passive voice, his final words are in the present. Was this one last satirical feint, some grand punctuationless statement by one of history’s truly visionary writers? Does it even matter? Speaking for myself, I am most intrigued as to why this exact sentence was the place where Patrick deviated from the usually and properly concluding full stop. He was, after all, among the most flawless of grammarians I have ever encountered. We may never know.

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Some final thoughts on my life with Knightsworth. I am one hundred and sixteen years old this year, and, when asked about my relationship with Patrick, I tell my company that I have lived a quiet and peaceful life, of which Patrick Knightsworth only occupied a few thirds. I read seventy-four years of his life, and much of it possessed a strange and terrible beauty.

The plain fact is that I am far too old, and far too spent, to marshal my thoughts on the work with any adequacy now. In my present condition it would require two further lifetimes to make sense of even the first half of the thing. Consider that as I handed each submitted page to the vault at Lloyd’s, it was the last time I ever saw it, for once the seal was set, not even I was granted access again. Perhaps it is the same with understanding: once something is locked away, it can never be revisited in quite the same way again. As is so often the case in life, one can only ever truly know anything after experiencing it first-hand and for oneself. Existence is impossibly difficult to explain, and I am not entirely sure even I have ever seen it done successfully. I honestly cannot remember anymore. Reader, as you embark on this sure-to-be demanding journey through the following 1,900 volumes, remember that you may only have time to go through the work in its entirety once (if you are lucky), so try to appreciate that what you are reading.

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Arriving at the conclusion of this short – yet regrettably diffuse – introduction to what is certain to become a major discipline, Knightsworth Studies, bridging and uniting, as it surely will, a number of fields of human endeavour, I must acknowledge my own modest proportion in it. I am merely one small part of what will undoubtedly become a project of such order and magnitude that one cannot even begin to speculate upon it at so early a time.

I have many regrets in life – never marrying, never having children – but reading Patrick is not one of them. Indeed, I cannot help but feel that, through my years of service to both the man and the monument, I have secured something more lasting than either progeny or posterity: a quiet kind of immortality. My name, modest though it is, will be carried alongside his through the corridors of the centuries, murmured by scholars yet unborn. And when the first university chairs in Knightsworth Studies are endowed, I trust that some small portrait of me – perhaps opposite the catalogue room – will serve as reminder that I, too, was here at the creation. It is a comforting thought, and I take it with me now as one might take a lantern into the dark: the certainty that what Patrick and I have built together shall never perish.

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